Poetry Sunday

As I mentioned earlier this week, I've been going back through all my old blog posts and trying to compile a searchable spreadsheet to let me more easily find posts I can revise or revisit. I'm back to 2015 now, and I found this Poetry Sunday offering from November 22nd of that year - a treat for my grammatically inclined friends from an author one doesn't normally associate with poetry ...

Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive

by Raymond Chandler

Miss Margaret Mutch she raised her crutch

With a wild Bostonian cry.

“Though you went to Yale, your grammar is frail,”

She snarled as she jabbed his eye.

“Though you went to Princeton I never winced on

Such a horrible relative clause!

Though you went to Harvard no decent larva’d

Accept your syntactical flaws.

Taught not to drool at a Public School

(With a capital P and S)

You are drooling still with your shall and will

You’re a very disgusting mess!”

She jabbed his eye with a savage cry.

She laughed at his anguished shrieks.

O'er the Common he fled with a hole in his head.

To heal it took Weeks and Weeks.

“O dear Miss Mutch, don’t raise your crutch

To splinter my new glass eye!

There ain’t no school that can teach a fool

The whom of the me and the I.

There ain’t no grammar that equals a hammer

To nail down a cut-rate wit.

And the verb ‘to be’ as employed by me

Is often and lightly split.

A lot of my style (so-called) is vile

For I learned to write in a bar.

The marriage of thought to words was wrought

With many a strong sidecar.

A lot of my stuff is extremely rough,

For I had no maiden aunts.

O dear Miss Mutch, leave go your clutch

On Noah Webster’s pants!

The grammarian will, when the poet lies still,

Instruct him in how to sing.

The rules are clean: they are right, I ween,

But where do they make the thing?

In the waxy gloam of a Funeral Home

Where the gray morticians bow?

Is it written best on a palimpsest,

Or carved on a whaleboat’s prow?

Is it neatly joined with needlepoint

To the chair that was Grandma’s pride?

Or smeared in blood on the shattered wood

Where the angry rebel died?

O dear Miss Mutch, put down your crutch,

and leave us to crack a bottle.

A guy like I weren’t meant to die

On the grave of Aristotle.

O leave us dance on the dead romance

Of the small but clear footnote.

The infinitive with my fresh-honed shiv

I will split from heel to throat.

Roll on, roll on, thou semicolon,

ye commas crisp and brown.

The apostrophe will stretch like toffee

When we nail the full stop down.

Oh, hand in hand with the ampersand

We’ll tread a measure brisk.

We’ll stroll all night by the delicate light

Of a well placed asterisk.

As gay as a lark in the fragrant dark

We’ll hoist and down the tipple.

With laughter light we’ll greet the plight

Of a hanging participle!”

She stared him down with an icy frown.

His accidence she shivered.

His face was white with sudden fright,

And his syntax lily-livered.

“O dear Miss Mutch, leave down your crutch!”

He cried in thoughtless terror.

Short shrift she gave. Above his grave:

HERE LIES A PRINTER’S ERROR.

Miss Mutch lives on in my eagle-eyed old friend Gonzo Dave, proofreader extraordinaire, and in generations of teachers who try hard to get generations of students to write proper English.

Have a good day and enjoy the rest of your weekend. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo