The Singing Season

Slipped My Mind

If I had singing masters they might say,
'Don't learn from birds
who pay their bills with worms, for they
have little to do with words;
though pregnant are their pauses,
songs full of brazen lilts and fondant trills,
yet little they know of clauses
nor discourse of the world's great ills.'

I had something to sing you, sure,
but it slipped my mind.

I have no singing masters; so, from the dead
I must learn what I can,
shovel their forms and styles into my head -
could there be a better plan?
So wide ranging their minds that span
all that's important to man / woman;
but wake recalling little that I read
the blackbird running there instead.

I had something to sing you, sure,
but it slipped my mind.

You'll learn little from nature but to Bombadillo
off-key like a farmer through the dawn,
a tractor blatting through a wallow,
your grammar and syntax all torn.
There's no need to weep for a willow,
for loftier things were you born:
look, where the bird flock passes the tower
sunbeams piercing this grey glower.

I had something to sing you, sure,
but it slipped my mind.

If you plow music in your furrow
you'll struggle with your sense:
'tomorrow's not 'to borrow' -
Shakespeare knew the difference.
Imagine on your deathbed now,
this is your sentence -
sharp, sound-byte required. Go!
Ah, you've stumbled at the final fence.

I had something to sing you, sure,
but it slipped my mind.

.............

Apologies to Yeats - who often used an elliptical refrain - and to birds. Each of the four Octads has a different rhyme scheme.

To 'Bombadillo' is to sing like Tolkien's Tom Bombadil.
One of my English teachers at school wrote on the the board: 'To borrow and to borrow and to borrow' to point out that it wasn't just the sound of the line which made Shakespeare's 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...' (from the Macbeth soliloquy upon hearing of Lady Macbeth's death) so good. Well...OK - but  the national debt still increases ;)