Poem: Twelfth Day of February

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.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS