Day: February 9, 2017

Caveat: the shining Big-Cheez-Burger

Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Not My Poetry

Apparently Longfellow's poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" has been rewritten in a LOLcat version (LOLcat, for those unaware, is a kind of internet 'meme' – i.e. a faddish and famous complex of behaviors, images and what might be called internet text-based dialect slang).

By the shores of Intar-Webbies,
By the shining Big-Cheez-Burger,
Stood the macro of Blue Kitteh,
Pièce de résistance, Blue Kitteh.
Dark behind it rose the sofa,
Rose the roomy gloomy sofa,
Rose the pics with lols upon them;
Bright before it post the comments,
Post the wry and funneh comments,
LOl@shining Big-Cheez-Burger!!

For comparison, here are the first ten lines of the original.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American poet, 1807-1882)

Credit for finding this belongs to the linguistics blog All Things Linguistic.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Englyn #88

A Daily Poem / Book 1 / Englyn / Life is a Dream / My Poetry & Fiction

(Poem #193 on new numbering scheme)

The green gorillas will gasp
and dance below clouds. A wisp
of mist gropes the trees that grasp
the hills. The cool air is crisp.

– an englyn proest dalgron. It may be surprising to hear that this is based on a fragment of a vivid dream I had 36 years ago, in 1981, while still in high school. I recorded it then in a journal I had. But this poem was written without consulting that journal – it’s just an image/story/vision that sticks with me. The full dream ended with nuclear holocaust – recall that I was in high school during the age of Reagan.

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