A favorite morbid pastime of mine is reading obituaries and the “In Memoriam” page of the local newspaper. If you can get past the feeling that you’re getting pleasure out of someone’s grief, some of the writing is really entertaining. Today I read the following, reproduced here in its entirety and without correction:
GRANDPA, I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
I will always love you
In my heart, soul, and memories
Your the who always told me
All about what you’ve sold
Everyday that goes by, Oh I wonder,
Why, Oh, Why?
I might not be perfect
But, all I do will be for you
The last day I saw you
I couldn’t believe!
How could you leave?
But it was your time
Oh thats for sure.
I didn’t want you to go
But you had to go home!
I know your in heaven
Up, Up, and away,
But, when you think of me,
I will think of you,
Just as if we were both protected glue.
I guess it’s your time
So long, bye bye
And one more thing, just for you
All my beauty is from you
So hopefully soon,
I’ll have your strength and brains too.
So Tooleu, and I sure Love You too!
*
That poem wholeheartedly reminds me of poetry I see in the Chicken Soup for <insert some vapid label here>.
It brings on the feeling I get when I know I’m going to barf so forcefully it’s going to come through my nose.
I have a book on poetry that has a chapter that states, more or less, that poetry should not be overly-sentimental or “preachy.”
I just want to know how this writer and his/her grandfather were like “protected glue.” For that matter, I want to know just what the heck “protected glue” is.
I’m trying not to laugh at “protected glue”, although I also wonder how the term relates to the previous phrase: “When you think of me/I will think of you”.
I’m refraining from forming an opinion only because I don’t know the age of the poet. S/he might be eight years old.
I am moving this weekend but if you can keep this thread alive I will post quotes from a wonderful book “Very Bad Poetry”. Contains such treasures of the nineteenth century as “Ode to an Enormous Wedge of Cheese” and “Elegy to a Disected Puppy”. Such fun!
I wish you folks were more open-minded about bad poetry. I plan to post all my future Pit posts in verse, and it’s gonna be pretty bad. But not as bad as the OP!
Just think: Now that person is a “published poet.”
I would guess that the poem r.d. has in mind is the “Ode to the Mammoth Cheese” by James MacRae, which appears in that classic of deadpan humour, Deacon’s The Four Jameses. Its opening lines are permanently embedded in my brain:
We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese,
Lying quietly at thine ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze–
Thy fair form no flies dare seize!
I do urge people to track down The Four Jameses: it’s a series of biographies of four appallingly bad Canadian poets from the turn of the (20th) century. The book was executed with such skill that even after its publication one of the poets included didn’t grasp that it was making fun of him, instead sending the author his warmest thanks. --N
I wondered if it might be a kid too, but after a few readings I think it’s a young adult who’s read a little too much “Chicken Soup for the…” Also, according to the introductory text Grandpa was 77 at the time of his demise, so you’d expect the poet to be around 20 or so.
I’m still trying to figure out what “Tooleu” means. Toodle-oo? Would you say that to the recently deceased?
See if you can get hold of a copy of Parlour Poetry: A Casquet of Gems; Michael Turner, editor; Viking Press, 1969. Reprinted as Victorian Parlour Poetry: An Annotated Anthology by Dover Publications in 1992.
It’s a great collection of unabashed senitmental verse, paeans to patriotism, pious exhortations, and other staples of poetry from an era of pre-electronic amusement…when people stood up in the front parlour (or vaudeville stage or lecture hall) and declaimed mawkish verse at one another. Such as
The cold winds swept the mountain’s height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And 'mid the cheerless hours of night,
A mother wandered with her child;
As through the drifting snows she pressed
The babe was sleeping on her breast.
And colder still the wind did blow,
And darker hours of night came on,
And deeper grew the drifting snow;
Her limbs were chilled, her strength was gone:
“O God,” she cried, in accents wild,
“If I must perish, save my child!”
– from “The Mother in the Snow-Storm” by Seba Smith (1792-1868)
The annotations provide an additional treat, with nice gossipy bits about the poets, and LOTS of excerpts from parodies of the better-known narratives.