And Now For A Little Poetry

What follows is either kinda cool or ghastly beyond belief. I leave you, kind readers, to judge:

The Merry Sweary Lullaby

Now is the time when evening falls,
From darkness hear the sleepy calls
Of ducks, and drowsy geese, and swans
All sitting by their shadowy ponds
With you I sit, with all my cares,
I’m singing a song for younger ears
Go to sleep, my little lamb
For you, dear love, I’d give a

Deal of damask, of brocade embroidered
With Damascus roses and crocuses, bordered
By poppies, for sleeping, I’d give you vermillion
Velvet, and quilts full of eider-down pillowing
Sleepy heads, sleepy, now lay down to nap,
O Pearl of the Evening, think of a

Crayfish crouching in clear water
Dreaming of the Sea-King’s daughter
Catching locks of her sea-green hair and
Winding them in its pincers there, she
Little grudges claw-hand weaving, for
Soaring to surface, she believing
Clouds are pillows, downy, white,
There she’ll sleep, you little

Should in the time of the passing moon
Run skipping in hallways or howl like a loon
She misses you, kisses you, blinks a sad eye,
She dances alone in the slumbering sky
But leave her, and grieve her – O! let her feel Loss!
Tell her, my dear, that you don’t give a

Tingle, a tangle, a blackberry bramble
A bright side, a right side, a snow-feather-light side
A creep, or a leap, or a river-willow-weep
Or Tongue for keeping, or Nose for seeping,
Or Mouth for cheeping, or Eye for peeping
With all my speaking -
You are sleeping.

Would you read it to a small child?

Technical Stuff:

1. Don’t ask me where I got the idea from, because I don’t actually remember. However, I had three audiences in mind when I wrote this: small children, who enjoy rhythmic, beautiful language and nice images; their parents, who love them and spend hours lulling them to sleep; and their parents, who have spent hours lulling them to sleep, and could do with a little quiet venting.

2. The first stanza is actually the last to be written. However, all my attempts to fit a verse to the first anti-couplet that I came up with were too twee and revolting, so I started writing at the couplet.

3. And that couplet didn’t even make it into the final version! It started “Go to sleep my little duck”. However, I didn’t like some of the subtexts, so changed it to “Go to sleep my little lamb” at the suggestion of Alan G (Thanks, Alan!).

4. This was an interesting lesson in prosody (the rhythms of the words). That first couplet was very trochaic (/ U / U / U) but the stanza that followed wanted to trip along in dactyls (/ U U / U U) – or anapasts, if you prefer (U U / U U /). I decided to capitalise on this change in rhythm, and wrote the crayfish stanza in heavy trochaic tetrameter (four feet/stresses per line). It originally went:

Crayfish crouching in clear water
Dreaming of the Sea-King’s daughter
Catching locks of sea-green hair
Winds them in its pincers there, she
Little grudges it the weaving,
Soars to surface, she believing
Clouds are pillows, fluffy, white, so
There she’ll sleep…

I was aiming for a contrast between the heavy ‘two’ rhythm and the light ‘three’ rhythm. Then my last stanza wouldn’t stay out of ‘three’ and, looking at, the change in rhythm was too heavy. I spent a bit of time converting the crayfish into absolutely perfect dactylic tetrameter, which I won’t quote because as verse it is inferior to both the original and the final versions.

My point is, that I looked at a poem in an absolutely consistent metre, and it was tumpty-tumpty beyond belief! I ended up aiming for a compromise, tucking a few unstressed syllables into the crayfish to ease the transition. I like it a lot better this way. (If it makes any confused readers feel better, I had to look up the technical terms for trochee and dactyl before I wrote the above.)

5. I’ve just finished writing the poem, and I am still in its event shadow, to use an analogy. I’ll probably look at it in a couple of days, when I have my breath back and can get some perspective, and make a few changes. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.