Intimates
Don't you care for my love? she said bitterly.
I handed her the mirror, and said:
Please address these questions to the proper person!
Please make all requests to head-quarters!
In all matters of emotional importance
please approach the supreme authority direct! --
So I handed her the mirror.
And she would have broken it over my head,
but she caught sight of her own reflection
and that held her spell bound for two seconds
while I fled.
Commentary
I’m not precisely sure why this is a poem, but I’ll take Lawrence’s word for it <g>. It certainly made me laugh out loud - lovely buildup (complete with exclamation marks) and a wonderfully unexpected last line.
— Martin
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Martin DeMello · 25 April 2003
Speaking of love’s friendly battles:
“To a girl with your ardent nature some one with whom you can quarrel is an absolute necessity of life. You and I are affinities. Ours will be an ideally happy marriage. You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with ‘Welcome’ written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop. I may have my faults–” He paused expectantly. Ann remained silent. “No, no!” he went on. “But I am such a man. Brisk give-and-take is the foundation of the happy marriage. Do you remember that beautiful line of Tennyson’s–‘We fell out, my wife and I’? It always conjures up for me a vision of wonderful domestic happiness. I seem to see us in our old age, you on one side of the radiator, I on the other, warming our old limbs and thinking up snappy stuff to hand to each other–sweethearts still! If I were to go out of your life now, you would be miserable. You would have nobody to quarrel with. You would be in the position of the female jaguar of the Indian jungle, who, as you doubtless know, expresses her affection for her mate by biting him shrewdly in the fleshy part of the leg, if she should snap sideways one day and find nothing there.”
– P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Piccadilly Jim’
Ahipkitty · 18 April 2004
What kind of poems does he write and what type of poems are the Week-night service and The Mystic Blue?