Coronation of the Pretender

The Ravens flee the Tower and Laughter dies to end Delight.

Where Squandered Blood cannot fade Caged Birds sing their Silence.

Bridges groan or else proclaim Disfavour by falling down.

Slammed Doors that Applaud without fealty Deafen in palaces no less than cottages.

While sullen Chimneys watch from clamant rooftops, the Smoke from hearths of Liegemen Declines to Wave.

The state-provisioned Welcome Mats of the Citizenry vaporise until merely the ‘O’ remains.

The People cry ‘O!’ 

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No fanfares. Trumpets droop, mute, the wilted flowers bruised by a Dynastical newborn Sun.

Children weep to see the coach horses tight-girthed by Caparisons torn from Night and Stars, and fear when – Behold! Mischief! – an unknown Season of Nature renders Black the whitest plumes.

Even the Oath of Office shrivels to a Spitball in the Archbishop’s hands.

The Procession disperses to muffled Brass, an Iron-shod Tread deadened by Loose Straw to calm the Most Notable Invalid’s final days, which sets the Measure when Mourning Veils descend with Leaden Pace to Drape the Chancellery and the Courthouse.

Unheeded, the Great Panjandrum’s Grand Inaugural Flypast is invisible at 30000 feet before – refueled mid-flight– the Honour Guard flees the Control Tower not to return.

The People’s Crier proclaims it’s Not Over until the Sick Man falls down and Declines to Wave. 

Meanwhile, low valleys of Kingcups are drowned in the Weeping of the Forsaken . . . before, praise God, the Moon turns Everyone to Stone. 

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‘Chubby Boy’ Orwell’s Earworm . . . Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer . . . ?

Has any Orwellian scholar, I wonder, checked the verses of their subject against the Suffolk heritage of his youth? 

As it is, I believe this dedicated champion of the proletariat most probably heard a neural echo of certain lines composed by a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier and ‘the first of Rural Bards’*, when he (George Orwell) wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem that must have persisted like an earworm from his days in Southwold . . . 

        When good King Edward ruled the land
        And I was a chubby boy.

Compare, then, this palimpsestic (?) verse with Robert Bloomfield’s Suffolk Dialect Ballad . . .

     When once a giggling Mawther [girl] you,
     And I a red-faced chubby boy. 

A couplet from Bloomfield’s Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs 1802. (The Walk to the Fair, page 5.)


* The poet Robert Bloomfield, of humble parentage, was celebrated as the author of The Farmer’s Boy (published in 1800 with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick); he was born in Suffolk two hundred and fifty years ago, in December 1766, and has a lasting reputation as one of the most significant of the uneducated rustic poets of the English tradition.  

The poet John Clare, (‘a poetical genius . . . in the humble garb of a farm labourer’) called Bloomfield ‘the first of Rural Bards’ and recognised his mastery of rustic descriptive verse.

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As I have conceded readily enough in earlier posts, I am very much an amateur literary sleuth hound, but I would be interested to know whether the Bloomfield/Orwell connexion has ever been made by contributors to the Orwell Foundation at University College London.  

For more literary sleuthing, see . . .
Grim Secrets of Room 101 which traces the horrors of the Ministry of Truth to their source in the works of the Hungarian Tabori Brothers
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/06/grim-secrets-of-room-101-is-it-time-to.html
and
Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/year-zero-thing-with-one-face-prescient.html
Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image? A Bicentennial Investigation
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html
and
Three haikus in homage to John Clare
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/three-haikus-in-homage-to-john-clare.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Three haikus in homage to John Clare.

Skylarks but no sky.

The river hems the dawn mist,

a canvas unworked.

Children roam in masks.

In the shop window a sign,
which reads: MIRRORS MADE.

Seeing two blackbirds,

he was reminded to buff
up his Sunday boots.