Set Bacchus from His Glassy Prison Free

Set Bacchus from His Glassy Prison Free

Speaking of book reviews, Lars Walker's excellent site www.brandywine.com often features them. I think it was they who inspired me to order "The Oxford Book of Parodies," which arrived today. It starts with the excerpts from "1066 and All That" that caught my eye in the review, including the immortal "Outfangthief is Damgudthyng." Parodies work best for me when they operate on an original that's both familiar and vivid in its style, so I'm the wrong audience for some of the featured pieces, but I appreciate these brief set pieces by Alexander Pope, from "The Art of Sinking in Poetry," for elegant everyday use:

Who Knocks at the Door?
For whom thus rudely pleads my loud-tongu'd Gate,
That he may enter?--

Shut the Door
The wooden Guardian of our Privacy
Quick on its Axle turn.--

Uncork the Bottle and Chip the Bread
Apply thine Engine to the spungy Door,
Set Bacchus from his glassy Prison free,
And strip white Ceres of her nut-brown Coat.

That last one is going to come in handy. Max Beerbohm nails G.K. Chesterton in "Some Damnable Errors About Christmas":

That is why for nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would have understood it form the first. What would have happened then, it is impossible to say. For that which is hated, and therefore is persecuted, and therefore grows brave, lives on for ever, whilst that which is understood dies in the moment of our understanding of it -- dies, as it were, in our awful grasp.

Then Chesterton returns the favor with "Old King Cole" in the style of a half-dozen authors, including W.B. Yeats:

Of an old King in a story
From the grey sea-folk I have heard,
Whose heart was no more broken
Than the wings of a bird.

As soon as the moon was silver
And the thin stars began,
He took his pipe and his tankard,
Like an old peasant man.

And three tall shadows were with him
And came at his command;
And played before him for ever
The fiddles of fairyland.

And he died in the young summer
Of the world's desire;
Before our hearts were broken
Like sticks in a fire.

Here is an updated A.A. Milne:

Christopher Robin is drawing his pension;
He lives in a villa in Spain;
He suffers from chronic bronchitis and tension,
And never goes out in the rain.

. . .

Christoher Robin goes coughety coughety
Coughety coughety cough;
All sorts and conditions of Spanish physicians
Have seen him and written him off.