TREASURES AND PLEASURES OF RHYTHM AND RHYME

Shakespeare’s Winter Song

When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

  And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,

And nightly sings the staring owl,

To-who,

To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

  And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

  And Marion’s nose is red and raw,

And roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

To-who,

To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Dad was really good at reading poetry to us at bedtime out of a little book that he found for 25 cents on a bargain table in Eaton’s basement. He had a quiet style that didn’t get in the way of a poem, just laid it out so that we could make up our own minds, as if he were discovering it himself for the first time.  Sometimes he threw in for free a nonsense verse by Lewis Carrol or our American contemporary, Ogden Nash. Dad was especially fond of mock cautionary verses like Hilaire Belloc’s in his Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.

We three children absorbed poetry and verse from the sublime to the ridiculous,  relishing in awed silence the sounds of Blake’s Tyger, tyger, burning bright, and stifling giggles when Hilaire Belloc recommended a yak from Thibet as a nursery pet. Richard Orme Allen (aka Dad or ROA) got his money’s worth by adding a twenty-five-cent impulse investment to an already extensive library of nonsense rhymes.
 

Growing up steeped in poetry and verse, we knew the difference between them first hand. None of us aspired to pen immortal sonnets, when we could indulge in a whimsical family tradition dating from the days of Queen Victoria. Those happened to be the days of cautionary verses written to scare children into being good. A wealth of stories of goodness rewarded and wickedness punished offered scope for parody by those very children subjected to their black-and-white morality. Defiant scribbles began in secret as teenaged Victorians like my father and his brothers shook off the constraints of their strict upbringing. My Uncle Elliott let off steam by writing scary verses himself, and frightening his young brothers into the bargain.

Nor was Elliott the only author of homegrown verses. Dad, his older sisters and his nieces were prolific in their production on any occasion. Ten minutes’ rapid reflection by ROA produced a memorable ditty to celebrate Aunt Mildred Fairbrother’s foray at age 52 into teaching in the wilds of Ontario. As a beginning teacher in Rhode Island she had been reprimanded for smoking between classes. Three decades later, the darling woman still smoked, like a chimney. An elegant silent butler was her send-off present, along with this cautionary verse:

When at school you need a drag

upon a coffin nail or fag,

its evil signs you need not strew,

but carry them about with you.

After her marriage, my mother caught the doggerel bug, and reeled off the occasional jingle, like this limerick composed at a party about our family doctor, who was also a school mate of Dad’s and a family friend:

There was a swell doc named Norm

Who said, “Please fill out this form.

Take this pill at dawn

And just carry on,

And I trust it will do you no harm.”

That inspires me to press the verse button in my brain, and take a break from prose.

Doggerel is doggerel, a distant relation

to poetry’s art. You feel the elation

of finding a rhyme for a pesky word -

for example like “doggerel”.

“I’ll fight through this fog or I’ll ...”

invent something outrageous, as yet unheard.

Forsaking poetry’s heights of splendour

and being a frugal and choosy spender

my father delighted in do-it-yourself.

He drew the line at a Hallmark card,

and had no intention of mocking the Bard,

roosting well-thumbed on a handy shelf.

He’d toss off a couplet with easy authority

to honour the birthday of his niece Dorothy

or any other occasion for jollity,

celebration, graduation or other frivolity.

It is now well over seventy years

since my father first read us a song of Shakespeare’s,

and gave us a feeling of rhythm and rhyme

that clearly has stood the test of time.

The measures that pictured winter’s woes

trickled down from my head to my toes

etching into my very being

Elizabethan winters that I was seeing.

So now, grandchildren, it’s time to mess

with Shakespeare’s winter, and take a guess

at how to depict a Muskoka scene

under the reign of a different queen,

the second to bear Elizabeth’s name.

Some things are different, and others the same.

His brilliant pen portrait still shines as ever.

I borrow his words but I could never

aspire to tarnish their timeless glow,

so this is a tribute, written in snow

and destined to melt away like frost,

unlike these lines from “Love’s Labour’s Lost":

When icicles hang by the wall ...

A few centuries later in a winter traffic jam north of Toronto:

WINTERIZING

A Muskoka Tribute to Shakespeare

When icicles hang by the wall,

they’re Bob the Builder’s blatant proof -

no matter how we warm the hall -

heat is escaping through the roof -

and that is where the heating bill

will go before the next snowfall.

The roads are foul and tempest-tossed.

Just follow the snowplow; you won’t get lost.

Don’t stamp on your brake, you reckless kid,

or your four-wheel drive will go into a skid.

You’d better avoid the 401

and a twenty-car pile-up that’s not much fun.

Black ice is a dreaded invisible danger.

In white-outs known landmarks turn suddenly stranger.

A sign by the roadside makes travellers think 

of a coffee shop and a hot, warming drink.

But it’s shut for the season, to their disgust,

so they stay on the road because they must.

Where’s Greasy Joan, to stir the pot,

and serve up meals that hit the spot?

Joan hath clothed, I mean, has closed

her Greasy Spoon and flown away

to Florida until next May,

leaving her baffled creditors,

to utter bleak, frustrated howls

strangely like the staring owl’s.