Matilda Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death. (Hillaire Belloc)
Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes;
Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth,
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth,
Attempted to Believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her,
And would have done so, had not She
Discovered this Infirmity.
For once, towards the Close of Day,
Matilda, growing tired of play,
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the Telephone
And summoned the Immediate Aid
Of London’s Noble Fire-Brigade.
Within an hour the Gallant Band
Were pouring in on every hand,
From Putney, Hackney Downs, and Bow.
With Courage high and Hearts a-glow,
They galloped, roaring through the Town,
‘Matilda’s House is Burning Down!’
Inspired by British Cheers and Loud
Proceeding from the Frenzied Crowd,
They ran their ladders through a score
Of windows on the Ball Room Floor;
And took Peculiar Pains to Souse
The Pictures up and down the House,
Until Matilda’s Aunt succeeded
In showing them they were not needed;
And even then she had to pay
To get the Men to go away,
It happened that a few Weeks later
Her Aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that Interesting Play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
She had refused to take her Niece
To hear this Entertaining Piece:
A Deprivation Just and Wise
To Punish her for Telling Lies.
That Night a Fire did break out–
You should have heard Matilda Shout!
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To People passing in the Street–
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence) – but all in vain!
For every time she shouted ‘Fire!’
They only answered ‘Little Liar!’
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.
Thomas Macaulay wrote Lays of Ancient Rome, and the most-quoted lines are these:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.”
Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner gets right to it.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Kung fu movie badass: Jabberwocky
Makes you go “Holy shit, that’s amazing”: Eminem’s use of palindromes at the sentence level in “Without Me”: But sometimes the shit just seems, everybody only wants to discuss me
So this must mean I’m disgusting, but its just me I’m just obscene
(becomes more obvious when you see his breakdown in the video.)
Makes other poets go “Holy shit, I wish I thought of that”: ee cummings
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll on your rifle and blow out your brains
An’go to your god like a soldier
There wasn’t a breath in that land of death,
and I hurried, horror-driven
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid,
because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say.
“You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you
to cremate these last remains”.
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,
and the trail has its own stern code,
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb
in my heart how I cursed that load!
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight,
while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows–
Oh God, how I loathed the thing!
And every day that quiet clay
seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent
and the grub was getting low.
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad,
but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing,
and it hearkened with a grin.
Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin’ daddies,
Knock me your lobes,
I came to lay Caesar out,
Not to hip you to him.
The bad jazz that a cat blows,
Wails long after he’s cut out.
The groovy is often stashed with their frames,
So don’t put Caesar down.
The swinging Brutus hath laid a story on you …
(God’s own drunk and a fearless man, you could look it up.)
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Are boys still taught to think like that? Like “The Impossible Dream,”
Deadly insipid and cloying and I know that its attitude is not survival-oriented, but it still gets me right there because that’s how I was raised, though I, like Sassoon, Graves, and Jarrell, would probably change my tune shortly after the balloon went up.
YES. I am looking for Old Testament badassery. Wrath and might of the lord, swords cutting like hot knifes through butter with the Angel of Death overlooking…all of it hahaha
And…not looking to derail this but full disclosure, I’m actually looking to get a tattoo…but instead of “oh my god flower and life and butterflies” I really just want to get something seriously badass ala the OP which is a tattoo Pam Poovey from Archer has on her whole back.
