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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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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