12 February 2020
· Short semi-elegy in mostly trochaic tetrameter ·
I found myself thinking about the rhyme
- Lizzie Borden took an axe
- Gave her mother forty whacks
- When she saw what she had done
- Gave her father forty-one
I suppose because of the axe, today being what it is. The situations are not analogous but an axe is an axe, so I let the dog run.
- Twelfth Day of February
- On this date in Fifty-Four
- Jane Grey’s head fell to the floor
- Husband’s head had fallen first
- While Jane her scaffold speech rehearsed
- Then her father’s, two weeks later
- He had been the instigator
- Part of Young Tom Wyatt’s plot to
- Somehow force Queen Mary not to
- Import Spanish Phil to wed.
- Unsuccessful. Traitors: dead.
- Mary’s council, though irate
- Was unable to implicate
- Elizabeth in all of this
- Disloyalty to her half-sis.
- And so Bess lived to see the day
- In oculis nostris, mirabile.
©2020 @edevere17 all rights reserved
It wants to metamorphose into iambs in a couple of places, and the Latin gets a metrical pass. Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, went to the block on the 23rd of the month, only eleven days after his daughter and son-in-law, but eleven squawked at being contracted into a monosyllabic ’lev’n. Three extra days falls within the bounds of poetic licence. I’ve gotten away with much worse.