OMG

Eugène Delacroix. The Death of Sardanapalus. 1827. Musée du Louvre.

“This country has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.” —President Donald Trump, press conference, February 24, 2025

Who was it said, Murder is suicide

with mistaken identity?

That’s what those school shooters

are all about—

Why Hitler sought to exterminate the Jews;

Why Stalin wiped out his former comrades with the NKVD;

Why Mao launched his Cultural Revolution;

Why Caligula wished all Rome had but a single neck

That he might hack off its head.

Sound familiar? I could go on:

Why hunters madly seek out game to kill;

Why sapients, unbeknown even to themselves,

advance the murder of their Mother Earth . . .

We identify our world with ourselves

—and vice versa:

The casual blasphemy of OMG.

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Housekeeping Night

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless . . .

—John Milton, Sonnet 19 (ca. 1652)

But who would credit that, that one talent

dug from the claggy Beauce and returned to it

with love, honour, suchlike bitter fruit.

—Geoffrey Hill, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983)

Why should that talent be death to conceal

and compared fruit returned bitter

as love and honor? We once used to say:

“It’s no big deal!” Talent noted, love, honor

that much the sweeter when returned,

I must recuse—albeit no way a quitter—

treat love and honor as two simple rights

that do not necessarily need be earned.

Emerging into light, I never asked for honor

or love, but took them as my due

for being there—and quenching rage at you.

“Eighty percent of life is just showing up,” said

Woody Allen, but he would find it not enough

—much more is asked for on Housekeeping Night.

Note: The epigraphs to this sonnet are discussed in Eleanor Cook’s intriguing book Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford University Press, 1998), chapter 7, from which I borrow them. Disclosure: Professor Cook graciously acknowledges in it, inter alia, “my splendid copyeditor, Peter Dreyer, master of griffin history and much more” (vii).

Google attributes the aphorism "Eighty percent of success is showing up" to "Donkey Hotey" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/10/showing-up/).

The Lives of the Poets: Clerihews after Auden*

Edward Lear and his cat Foss (short for Adelphos—Greek, "Brother") sketched by Lear in an 1879 letter

… to stink of Poetry / is unbecoming, and never / to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick / ought to be something a man of / honor, awaiting death … / could read without contempt … —W. H. Auden, “The Cave of Making”

William Blake took the cake

playing at Adam and Eve in the nude.

Said Catherine Sophia:

But isn’t it rude!?

Robert Browning

wasn’t much given to clowning.

Instead of a risqué anthology,

he gave us Bishop Blougram’s Apology.

George Gordon, Lord Byron,

never slept with a Siren.

He would’ve if he could’ve.

Which is not to say he should’ve!

Arthur Hugh Clough

wasn’t terribly tough.

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

he was sometimes known to complaineth.

Grorge Herbert

denied himself that second scoop of sherbert,

fearing such indulgence

would mess up his metaphysical refulgence.

Edward Lear,

that owlish old dear,

kept a cat called Foss.

Who was definitely the boss.

John Milton

never raised a toast at the Paris Hilton

but enjoyed many a festive trinque

at the Four Seasons Hotel George V.

Alexander Pope,

being no kind of dope,

would not have wanted just any old motto

inscribed on his personal grotto!

Thomas the Rhymer,

that street-smart old timer,

was troubled by the implications

of The Gotham Review of Revelations.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

(just on the quiet)

took Noli me tangere

for a come-hither query.

Auden’s clerihews are neat—

just as witty perhaps as sweet.

He was never too grand to dream

up metaphors teetering on the brink.

*W. H. Auden, “Academic Graffiti,” in Collected Poems (Vintage International, 1991), 676–86.

Note: These clerihews were originally published in the New English Review in November 2023.