Sharing another unusual poem from the slim volume ‘Unserious Rhymes’ authored and published in 1938 by the mysterious P. Blagg of 2 Whitehall Gardens, Chiswick, London W.4.

Though its metrical pattern has some inconsistencies, and it can hardly be called a GREAT poem, I find it memorable for its confident versification and eccentric originality:


KETTLE-POTTERY
by P. Blagg

Mountain:

   Oh molehill, molehill, horrid little molehill,
         Burrowed untidily where my smoothest greensward grew,
   How can I dream, contemplatively, calmly,
         With my skin itching from such vermin-bites as you?
                   How can I stay serene and take my rest
                             With pimples on my breast?

Molehill:

   Oh mountain, of unint’resting inertia,
         Cumbrous and lethargic upon the country’s face,
   I am the proof of life and life’s activity,
         The sign of matter ruled by mind, the anti-commonplace.
                   You are disintegrating ever since your birth,
                             Poor wrinkle of old earth.

Mountain:

   Oh molehill, molehill, conceited and impertinent.
         What is it you are at all but just a rubbish heap?
   Rubbish a monstrosity, living on worms and slimy things,
         Heaved from his dark underworld beneath my browsing sheep,
                   Industrial detritus you are, vile mound,
                             Disfiguring the ground.

Molehill:

   Oh stony-hearted lumpy-looking mountain,
         With inconvenient granite sticking out,
   And few, too few, soft spots at all amenable
         To my adventurous maker’s questing snout,
                   you’re wrapped in clammy vapour half the time,
                             And wearisome to climb.

Mountain:

   Oh molehill, molehill, despicable molehill,
         Your jealous raillery and feeble sneers must stop,
   No one disputes the height of my preeminence,
         Bearing the very heavens lightly on my top.
                   Even contemptuous cows with cloven hoof
                             Trample your paltry roof.

Molehill:

   Oh old back-number, antiquated mountain,
         Stuck in the mud of antediluvian pasts,
   Fashioned before the fashions and the decencies
         Which in a modern mould a cultured being casts.
                   I am a bright young thing, at any rate,
                             Entirely up-to-date.

(Thus great things spurn the small, and small things great,
and both each other’s attributes berate.
One boasts of quality and one of size
And to each other’s virtues shut their eyes.
They both forget––while epithets are hurled––
It takes a bit of both to make a world.)

Very nice. I even learned a couple of new words. But did you do the formatting yourself? Manually inserted all those '& n b s p ;' thingies, I mean. I appreciate that even more!

Manually, in a sense. In Word before posting. Copying those thingies singly or in pre-counted groups and pasting them at the start of the right lines using Ctrl+v is fairly quick. The result looks like a garden overgrown with boxthorn though, so it takes faith to trust it will convert to the intended format (more or less) when cut and posted.

Wonder if there's another keyboard spell one can invoke to italicise words in Emule. That would be useful.

That's a good one Ian. Another in the same vein:


Gold in the Mountain

Gold in the mountain,
And gold in the glen,
And greed in the heart,
Heaven having no part,
And unsatisfied men.

Herman Melville

italicise words in Emule ...


I know that used to be possible, but I think something was done to the whole site to make it harder for hackers to manipulate the pages with malicious code. I know I previously could make italics with the < i > and < /i > tags, but when I now see my old posts where I used them, the messages now show only the tags without any italics.

Looking at the source for this page shows [www.w3.org] as the language being used, so here are some experiments below to see what may or may not work.

Emphasis testing
Bold bold
Strong strong
Italics italics
Citation cite
Underline underline

Misc:




text window  vs. full screen