Not only marble, but the plastic toys
 From cornflake packets will outlive this rhyme
 I can't immortalize you, love - our joys
 Will lie unnoticed in the vault of time.
 When Mrs. Thatcher has been cast in bronze
 And her administration is a page
 In some O-Level text-book, when the dons
 Have analysed the story of our age,
 When travel firms sell tours of outer space
 When aeroplanes take off without a sound
 And Tulse Hill has become a trendy place
 And upper Norwood's on the underground
 Your beauty and my name will be forgotten -
 My love is true, but all my verse is rotten

(from “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis)

Notes: Parody of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LV, “Nor Marble nor the Gilded

Monuments”. Strugnell is Cope’s fictional creation, a ‘rimer’ whose tragedy it is to fall under the obvious influence of one great poet after another.

One of my happier poetry purchases over the last year was Cope’s delightful volume, “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis”. It’s rare that I will sit and read a single-poet collection through in one sitting, but Cope kept me entranced all the way to the end, and laughing out loud as often as not.

Today’s poem was definitely one of the laugh-out-loud ones, particuarly for the superb image in the opening two lines. Many great poets have turned their hands towards parody, but this particular form of bathos is something Cope handles better than anyone I’ve seen. (For another great Strugnellian juxtaposition of the high poetic and the utterly commonplace, see Poem #587 and its “incandescent football in the East”). After that, the poem sadly degenerates a bit, with Strugnell amply establishing his credentials as a Bad Poet, but lacking that touch of inspired unselfconsciousness that makes the Strugnell/Cope poems so funny. But the ending makes up for all that, with its utterly memorable lament - “my love is true, but all my verse is rotten” (incidentally, a dig at yet another Shakespearean sonnet). Pure genius.

— Martin

Links

Sonnet LV:

http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/shakespeare/not_marble_nor_gilded.html

Sonnet CXXX: Poem #44

More on “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis” after Poem #693, and more on Cope after Poem #1323