Some Poems Have Really Great Titles

10 thoughts on “Some Poems Have Really Great Titles”

1. Hahaha. Now that’s a delightful poem. 🙂

2. The titles aren’t quite up to standard, but these amuse me anyway.
   Fisher v. Lowe
   A wayward Chevy struck a tree
   Whose owner sued defendants three.
   He sued car’s owner, driver, too,
   And insurer for what was due
   For his oak tree that now may bear
   A lasting need for tender care.
   The Oakland County Circuit Court,
   John N. O’Brian, J., set forth
   The judgment that defendants sought,
   And quickly an appeal was brought.
   Court of Appeals, J. H. Gillis, J.,
   Gave thought and then had this to say:
   1) There is no liability,
   Since No-Fault grants immunity,
   2) No jurisdiction can be found
   Where process service is unsound;
   And thus the judgment, as it’s termed
   Is due to be, and is
   Affirmed.
   [1] AUTOMOBILES k251.13
   Defendant’s Chevy struck a tree,
   There was no liability.
   The No-Fault Act comes into play,
   As owner and the driver say.
   Barred by the act’s immunity,
   No suit in tort will aid the tree.
   Although the oak’s in disarray,
   No court can make defendants pay.
   [2] PROCESS k4
   No jurisdiction could be found,
   Where process service is unsound.
   In personam jurisdiction
   Was not even legal fiction
   Where plaintiff failed to well comply
   With rules of court that did apply.
   * * *
   J. H. GILLIS, Judge.
   We thought that we would never see
   A suit to compensate a tree.
   A suit whose claim in tort is prest,
   Upon a mangled tree’s behest;
   A tree whose battered trunk was prest
   Against a Chevy’s crumpled crest;
   A tree that faces each new day
   With bark and limb in disarray;
   A tree that may forever bear
   A lasting need for tender care.
   Flora lovers though we three,
   We must affirm the court’s decree.
   Affirmed.
   Michigan Court of Appeals
   333 N.W. 2d 67 Mich. App. 1983
   Northwest Reporter, Second Series, vol. 333, p. 67
   For non-poetic justices, there is John Updike:
   V.B. Nimble, V.B. Quick
   V.B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
   Washes, shaves and very soon
   Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
   Swings a tadpole by the tail,
   Undoes his coat, removes his hat,
   Dips a spider in a vat
   Of alkaline, phones the press,
   Tells them he is F.R.S.,
   Subdivides six protocells,
   Kills a rat by ringing bells,
   Writes a treatise, edits two
   Symposia on “Will man do?,”
   Gives a lecture, audits three,
   Has the sperm club in for tea,
   Pensions off an ageing spore,
   Cracks a test tube, takes some pure
   Science and applies it, finds,
   His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,
   Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,
   And, by one o’clock, is gone.
   John Updike

3. cartoon music
   when i hear Vivaldi
   i reach for the remote
   i do not want
   what they’re selling
   (Hawkeye out of character)
   but when i hear Berlioz
   i think of skunks singing
   chasing cats
   running and bouncing
   like small black furry antelope
   through Paris in love
   Carl Stalling giddy in the projection booth
   (Julia Roberts reaching for the cabinets)
   —
   (me)

4. An Unusual Cat Poem
   My cat is dead
   But I have decided not to make a big tragedy out of it
   Wendy Cope

5. The Buddhists Have the Ball Field
   –James Tate
   The Buddhists have the ball field. The teams arrive, nine on one, but only three on the other. The teams confront the Buddhists. The Buddhists present their permit. There is little point in arguing it, for the Buddhists clearly have the permit for the field. And the teams have nothing, not even two complete teams. It occurs to one team manager to interest the Buddhists in joining his team, but the Buddhists won’t hear of it. The teams walk away with their heads hung low. A gentle rain begins. It would have been called anyway, they think suddenly.

6. The Fate of the Fat Man’s Son
   The Fat Man’s sire was a leaner man from the Northern hemisphere;
   He lived in a day ere the fat began to smother us all out here;
   He worked for years in the building trade, when the trades were good estates,
   And grafted still when his “pile” was made, but he and his men were mates.
   He paid them well when the times were good-he never put on the screw;
   His words were short, and his manners rude; but his heart was right, they knew.
   And they knew the price of each job he took, in the days when a job meant “graft”,
   For the book he kept was an open book, as fitted that grand old craft.
   His foremen’s rule was firm, but fair, the rules of his shop were just;
   His eldest son was a workman there-’twas much to the son’s disgust.
   “The boss” had houses and land in town-a fact he wouldn’t deny;
   But when times were flinty the rents came down-they never were extra high.
   He kept his houses in good repair; what he promised was always done;
   He always knew how his tenants were, for he knew them every one.
   He steadily, honestly, ran his race, and finished and went to rest-
   Some tears were shed for the hard old case with a heart in his hairy chest.
   He lay for weeks, so the foremen tell, but his men’s respect he had;
   And the work had never been done so well as it was “when the boss was bad”.
   The workman came in their Sunday best, they were men from many lands,
   The boss’s coffin was borne to rest by four of his oldest hands.
   The hopeful son, in the sight of men, some crocodile tears let drop;
   He never put on the clothes again that he wore in his father’s shop.
   His father’s friends and his father’s ways were a lot too slow for him;
   He joined in booms and he spent his days with men who were in the swim.
   He lowered the wages and raised the rents, and he voted straight for greed,
   For law and order and cent per cent were parts of the Fat Man’s creed.
   He turned the widows and orphans out for the shillings they failed to find,
   The tenants went to the right about if the rent was a week behind.
   The girls that slaved in his sweating mills, the rents of the pubs he owned,
   And many a brothel paid the bills when the Fat Man’s table “groaned”.
   The Fat Man’s son to a high school went as his father’s weight increased,
   And several years of his life he spent in the study of tongues deceased.
   He shone as “stroke” in the sculling race, the match of his day he won;
   He sowed his oats and he went the pace-he lived like a Fat Man’s son.
   The Fat Man died one day in his chair, as many a Fat Man dies;
   His bloated body was packed with care in a coffin of extra size.
   The ghouls of death in their human shape, with looks severely grave,
   And damp, limp women in yards of crape prevailed at the Fat Man’s grave.
   The will was read by a lawyer mild. The property all was-gone!
   The son was left with a wife and child, and nothing to keep them on.
   He cursed his fate and he blamed the dead that he had never learnt a trade;
   He worked in his father’s father’s shed for the wage that his father paid.
   He led a strike, and he got the sack when the paltry point was won;
   They offered bribes, but he turned his back, though he was a Fat Man’s son.
   To tell it all were a lengthy task-his poverty’s black despair-
   Go out in the world yourself and ask poor devils who have been there.
   His life embittered and health destroyed ere half of his years had run,
   The saddest case with the unemployed was that of the Fat Man’s son.
   His daughter worked in a sweating den, where the pure and the vile were mixed,
   A shilling a day was the wages then by her fat grandfather fixed.
   His senses swam in a lurid mist as desperate things he thought-
   The Fat Man’s son was an Anarchist, a couple of shingles short.
   His poor wife died, and his son was gaoled; his daughter-she didn’t go right.
   And he blew up a ship that his sire had sailed with a cartridge of dynamite.
   The papers never exactly knew how the fiendish deed was done,
   When the good ship Greed and its blackleg crew went down with the Fat Man’s son.
   Henry Lawson

7. I really can’t see this being by Raleigh, as in Sir Walter, the Elizabethan coutier/explorer: it looks like a piece of doggerel from a much later period. Victorian? Maybe 18th Century?
   The rhyme scheme, the sentence structure, the diction and the vocabulary are all way too modern.
   It’s still a cute poem, of course.

8. AHAH!
   I love being pedantically right:)
   It’s by Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922), a Scottish poet. The proper attribution is in Representative Poetry Online, which is right here.
   And it’s written in 1903.
   Hurray for the first line index.

9. jrochest: I just figured out the same thing. — I mean, I had assumed that the spelling had been modernized, but completely missed the rest. A bio of this poet is here.
   Thanks — and I’ll leave a comment on the site where I found this, wrongly attributed.

10. I know I’m commenting on a now quite old post by Hilzoy. But I found the poem about the hostile, biting dog quite funny. It reminded me of the funnier poems Rudyard Kipling wrote. I remember well how I laughed when reading the poems in “Departmental Ditties” and “Barrackroom Ballads.” Especially the poem titled “Municipal.” Let me hasten to say I don’t claim to be an expert on poetry. I’ve not read as widely as Hilzoy apparently has done. But I have read and enjoyed translations of “Beowulf,” “The Song of Roland,” Dante’s THE DIVINE COMEDY, Chaucer’s THE CANTERBURY TALES, Arthur Waley’s translation of THE BOOK OF SONGS, and JRR Tolkien’s sadly unfinished THE LAY OF LEITHIAN, and various other poems of different kinds. And I hope to soon get Lee M. Hollander’s translation of THE POETIC EDDA. And that’s about all, really, when it coems to poetry I’ve read or hope to read. Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks

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