Advice to Poets
Keep away from nightingales –
they’re patented by Keats;
and don’t you dare touch daffodils
or ever think of wandering lonely as a cloud –
You’ll incur the wrath of Wordsworth.
Swans did you say?
Yeats will sue you;
and as long as we’re talking
about birds,
steer clear of that albatross –
Coleridge can cast a curse on you.
How about stopping by woods
one evening in the snow?
Frost will run you off with a pitchfork.
Ah, but surely there’s still something
like deserts, say, and a forgotten tyrant…
it’s no go with Shelley.
Can’t even use the simple “To be” –
Shakespeare’s sapped it dry;
or a humble red wheelbarrow
glazed in the rain –
Williams will wallop you.
For heaven’s sake what’s left?
Suicide!
Alas, Dorothy Parker has
already poeticized that…
You might as well stop writing.
Poems mentioned:
- #John #Keats “Ode to a Nightingale”
- #William #Wordsworth “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
- #William #Butler #Yeats “Leda and the Swan”
- #Samuel #Taylor #Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
- #Robert #Frost “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
- #Percy #Bysshe #Shelley “Ozymandias”
- #William #Shakespeare “Hamlet”
- #William #Carlos #Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow”
- #Dorothy #Parker “Resumé”