Found in a University of London College magazine from December 1921 this poem/ parody by the novelist
Stella Gibbons. She was 19 at the time and had just begun a two-year Diploma in Journalism at UCL. The course had been established for ex-servicemen returning from the First World War, but attracted several women, including another future novelist - Elizabeth Bowen. After a spell as a caustic book reviewer at
The Lady her first book (poetry) was published in 1930, and in 1932 her masterpiece
Cold Comfort Farm appeared. This, too, was a parody (of the current 'loam and lovechild' school of rural novelists.) The writers parodied are mostly somewhat forgotten: Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Eden Philpotts - although D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy did not escape her mirth. In this piece modernist poets (T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound?) are mocked..
The Marshes of My Soul
(With apologies to the latest School of Decoratively- Melancholy Introspectives.)
I.
Brackish …brackish,
The Pools of Weariness, flung in a glimmering chain
Reach the horizon.
And my thoughts, like purple parrots
Brood
In the sick, light trees
Blowing above those shallow pools
In whorls and whorls
Noiselessly
Printing a monotonous pattern upon the heavy air
Like watery curves upon the silken robe of a dying Mandarin.
II.
I am a peg, pinning up
Nebulous shadows of half guessed moods
Along the clothesline of "Let's-be-Clever."
Sometimes (ah - rape of the Muse by the cold fingered--)
Doubt takes me.
I wonder
If all these mists and moods and parrots mean
Much?
Cheap shot: you'd win cachet if (rather than going for the clunking obvious a la daily Mail) you'd shown parody of Hardy x
ReplyDeleteThe journalism course was also taken by Patricia Rubinstein, later renowned for her up-market school stories under the pseudonym Antonia Forest.
ReplyDeleteThe parody seems a mish mash of Imagism and Edith Sitwell. Certainly the parrots are pure Sitwell.
ReplyDelete