h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just a quick hello and wish you all a happy new year. Hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas.

That poem does indeed look very Vogon Hull. 'Fraid I haven't a clue!

Sal

Wonderful to hear from you Sal, O No.1 Fan!

We've missed you. Hope you had a great Christmas. Have a look at my message in the From Parnassus thread.

This was from 'The Metropolitan Railway' by Sir John Betjamin, (subtitle 'Baker Street Station Buffet').

The first verse is even worse:

Early Electric! With what radiant hope
Men formed this many-branched electrolier
Twisted the flex around the iron rope
And let the dazzling vacuum globes hang clear,
And then with hearts the rich contrivance fill'd
Of copper, beaten by the Bromsgrove Guild.


Oh, the pathos, the bathos of that final phrase!


If anyone would like the next go, jump in. If not I'll carry on.


Hull

Silly me I was thinking John Betjamen but when you said last century I was thinking of the 1800s rather than the 1900s.

I had the following quote lined up which should be easy now except that I don't remember the name of the poem.

Encase your legs in nylons
Bestride your hills with pylons.


Beth

Such an absurd couplet is obviously Betjeman.
I find Betjamin odd to categorise, because he writes such rubbish, yet it's sincere and moving.

He tries to write in an ourtmoded style, as if Keats or someone were tring to write like Pope. Either he or the contemporary style will last, and I'm afraid it'll be the contemporary style.

Really! Clad in nylons bestriding the hills with pylons (just to make it rhyme)!!!

The title, obscure enough, is 'Inexpensive Progress'. As if expensive progress were necessarily superior!! (Progress at all is the bad thing here, perhaps).

Enough of poets with extreme personal problems and conflicts. Try this:

Now that I've nearly done my days,
And grown too stiff to sweep or sew,
I sit and think, till I'm amaze,
About what lots of things I know:
Things as I've found out one by one -
And when I'm fast down in the clay,
My knowing things and how they're done
Will all be lost and thrown away.


I think this is excellent, absolutely non-Vogon. Female, better known for her prose works for children, early 20th century

Hull



.
.

gellukig nieuwjaar everyone


Hull

*Hunts around for Fans. Nobody about. Realises the painful solitude of Genius*

OK,OK. The poem was called 'The Things That Matter'. It's in Larkins' Oxford Book of 20th c. English Poetry, and probably nowhere else.

It starts in a non-Vogon vein - the extract was the first verse, but rapidly attains out-and-out Vogonity, e.g.

Young wives come in a-smiling, grave,
With secrets that they itch to tell:
I know what sort of times they'll have,
And if they'll have a boy or gell...

*if anyone should ever pass this way again*
But who is the Author`? Date 1905. Think Railway Children.

Hull

Railway Children? E. Nesbit? Sorry if it was too obscure.

Now for the most popular poem in English in a BBC poll in 1995

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same...

Male, early 20th c.


Hull

'If' by Rudyard Kipling!

Hi Hull

I'm just off to bed now... 4.15am here!
I'll try to come up with one tomorrow if I have time, but have a birthday celebration to go to and a party at night so it may be tricky.

shazz

Well done, shazz


Have a great time, and we'll see you when we see you!


Hull

Where'd everybody go?

Hi Beth O Wondrous 1

Sal's ill and can't use her computer
Tibs hasn't been seen for ages
shazz is being very busy being very busy all over the place in RL and on the Post (in RL?)
Beth's gone West and only appears occasionally
I'm still here

Would you like to pose a poem?

Graciously,

Hull

Most gracious Hull

I am useless without my books!

How can you live with no books???

Must be a REAL change from the shop


Hull

Who's going to come up with the next question?

Will it be Beth?
Will it be Sal?
Will it be Hull?
Will it be Nyree?
Will it be shazz?

OK, then, it's me. This is from a well-known poem from quite early in the 20th c. To my mind one of the finest poems of the whole century.


Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.........


Clues: English, male. The name of the poem isn't in English.

Name of poem and poet, please.


Hull

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen.

A favourite of old English teacher as it happens and so embedded in my brain forever!

Beth

Yes ! Spot on. Sorry the excerpt was long-ish, but I wanted to
include limping on, blood-shod.


Now it's your turn, Beth


Hull

Aloft,
In the loft,
Sits croft;
He is soft.

Twentieth century English, female - and that's the whole poem.

Beth

That's Stevie Smith, that is - who else could it be? I think it's called 'Croft", Try this one:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me

English, 19th-20th century.


Hull

Yes Stevie Smith. Nobody seems to appreciate her anymore - but maybe that is just here


Mandalay - Rudyard Kipling

How about -

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

20th century english

Beth



PS It is very foggy tonight - I almost got lost on the way home. That's a hard thing to do in a small town!!