Sonnet 3 — After WS
Dan WildScatter my ashes in your vale of kings,Or by a pond secure from frosty wind;Or lake, perhaps, where yesterday’s tidingsBring repose and solace I might yet findFrom the harsh sun that burnt me brown as duskIn autumn. Winter is yet to come, I fear,When sheilas dress refined and smell of muskWhile silent Indian gurus are …
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Percy the Pianist: Canto 1, stanzas 31-41
Dan WildPrevious.. 31Half a day before the gathering stormRose Percy, not Percival of Wagner’sDour overture, based on the French wormOf Tours – these were really snaky nagas,Like an open pack of Lady gagasBought from a small Chinese tobacconistThat sells everything except hate. No ragasWould be played today, nor would F. LizstBe taken out of the stool …
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Percy the Pianist: Canto I, stanzas 21-30
Dan WildStanzas 1-20 21Next eve the band Toucani reconvened,A final chance to demonstrate the planTo put on stage was sound. Absent a fiendOr devilish surprise, the piano manPercy was full prepared, the billy canOf his musical ideas ready to overflow.He was not going to AfghanistanTo liberate or command, althoughHis nerves seemed to say that this was …
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Digression after Bruce Acotyledon’s Seminar – Intellectual verse
Dan WildThe dear reader will forgive me, first if I address him as “dear”, when his acquaintance I probably have not made nor ever will. Secondly, for assuming that my reader is a ‘he’. The fact is, women do not read my work, and if they did, they would be too embarrassed to admit it and …
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Percy the Pianist: A Byronic Poem
Dan WildTake heed: nothing below is spoken seriously:No lasting harm has come from poetryExcept to the self-proclaimed poet’s dignity. 1Meet young Percy: our aspiring pianistWhose name has been sufficiently amended:He’s in his prime when all life’s finestPleasures should arrive and wounds intended,Dismissed or put aside. Confidence Should permeate his every move and showA man of influence. …
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The origins of John Polidori and The Vampyre: Byron’s greatest work
Dan WildI really started becoming fascinated with the Shelley-Byron circle during my English honours year at the University of Sydney. My mother read me the poems of Shelley as a teenager and I had already encountered William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge at school. The first wave of English literary romantics were interesting enough. Wordsworth with …
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