If the first principle of comedy is timing, the second is observation. Comic impersonators succeed only when they have internalized all their subjects’ subtleties of voice and mannerism, replicating not only what subject say and do, but also what they would say and do in any number of wildly improbable hypothetical situations. Likewise, poetic parodists, having put on a famous voice — that of T. S. Eliot, say — can blather on in that voice, with all its rhetorical tics and obsessions, about essentially nothing, to tremendous effect.  

Or they may blather on about something. Today’s Poem of the Day selection, by an anonymous poet, takes the voice and mannerisms of Christina Rossetti’s famous poem, “A Birthday,” and (as the Spinal Tap expression goes) turns the whole thing up to eleven. The parodist imagines that Rossetti’s speaker has awakened one morning to find herself transfigured into a beleaguered husband, a Rupert or a Harold, for example, who has supposed himself, maybe a little delusionally, to be king of his semi-detached villa in some nameless road. This speaker assumes Rossetti’s fevered diction, with all its lavish repetitions and imperatives, as well as her poem’s two tetrameter octets, in a clench-jawed expression of that which cannot be vented in the presence of his wife.   

An Unexpected Pleasure 
by Anonymous 

My heart is like one asked to dine 
Whose evening dress is up the spout;  
My heart is like a man would be 
Whose raging tooth is half pulled out.  
My heart is like a howling swell 
Who boggles on his upper C;  
My heart is madder than all these —  
My wife’s mamma has come to tea.  

Raise me a bump upon my crown, 
Bang it till green in purple dies; 
Feed me on bombs and fulminates, 
And turncocks of a medium size. 
Work me a suit in crimson apes 
And sky-blue beetles on the spree; 
Because the mother of my wife 
Has come — and means to stay with me.  

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.