Donald Thomas

COURTIER’S SPEECH

Who was the King ? The King was a man Prone to turn turtle in a purple rage And cleave the neck-bone Of the nearest sycophant With the nearest cleaver.

What of the King’s mirth ? The King was his own jester. A wag With a born flair For the practical possibility Of lobster-men boiled in their baths, Or the trick board to spring them To a spiked pit. Not a dry eye in the whole house.

What were the King’s lusts ? Rape was his aphrodisiac to murder. As he rode by, the flames of our homes Lit the skewered bellies of wives and daughters. Our senile parents danced like whores To win reprieve. Being a married man himself, He knew, when seeking information, The true value of family relationships.

What was the manner of the King’s death ? A whole peacock in his strangled belly.

And what after he died? In his will he gave his gardens to the people For their recreation. We all agreed with his obituary. ‘He was a man of more than life-size, Of gruff repartee, extravagance.’ One couldn’t help admiring, though, remembering A monarch of the old school, whom We shall not look upon again.

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Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry By JAMES A. HEFFERNAN As the first full length study of Wordsworth's poetic theory, this book reveals the underlying coherence and continuity of his varied statements about poetry 1 over the years. 81s net

Concordance du Thehtre et des Poesies de Jean Racine

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Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE ENGLISH INSTITUTE

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Marianne Moore AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY

by GeorgeW. Nitchie Emphasizing Marianne Moore’s intentions and her craft, Mr. Nitchie examines her poetry in detail, discusses poems that Miss Moore has abandoned since their first publication, and traces the persistent and often highly significant revisions that she has made on other poems in the course of their successive reprintings.

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Icons of Justice ICONOGRAPHY AND T-TIC IMAGERY IN

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by Jane Aptelcar Mrs. Aptekar uses Book V, the Legend OfJustice, to demonstrate Edmund Spenser’s use of ‘icons’. By reference to emblems and other heraldic and allegorical pictures, and to the analogous icons in Spenser’s poetry, the author shows Spenser’s ideas about justice to be coherent and relevant, and Book V to be an artistic whole, d e d by its narrative structure and by its fields of imagery and allusion. She demonstrates that Spenser manipulates his icons to create a complex, maturely ironic poem, which simultaneously explores several con- flicting philosophies of justice.

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