"Earth has not anything to show more fair (mind the stairs! mind the stairs!)"
Wordsworth didn't write, "Mind the stairs!" But "Earth has not anything to show more fair" is the first line of his lines "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802," which my friend Sarah featured on her poetry blog last week.
What happened was that I read the poem, which I hadn't read in a long, long time, and I thought, "I've heard that line somewhere else! And I think I'm hearing it now in Michael Flanders's voice!" And then I had to piece together the rest of the song around it in my mind. Drove me crazy.
i grew up with flanders and swann very young, and then there was a huge gap when i wasn't listening to them but was reading poetry in school and whatnot. it's been hilarious to come back to them as an adult and catch all the allusions. i nearly swallowed my tongue laughing at the "watch the wall, my darlin', while the bedstead men go by."
Oh, thank you. I'm now more humble and less ignorant. :-)
Martha, I once shrieked with laughter in the middle of a German lesson because I'd suddenly understood that the line from Tom Lehrer's song about Hubert Humphrey was actually, "As someone once remarked to Schubert, 'Take us to your *Lieder*.'"
Geoff and I say, "There you sit, smoking that potato" to each other much more often than sane people should. Greenfleeves is great for all sorts of word-whimsy.
And I never hear that horn concerto without hearing, "I once had a whim and I had to obey it/To buy a French horn in a secondhand shop..."
7 comments:
If you look long enough, you can usually track "IT" down in England. Right? :)
Peace
Okay, I give up. What Wordsworth allusion? I neither hear nor see it.
"Earth has not anything to show more fair (mind the stairs! mind the stairs!)"
Wordsworth didn't write, "Mind the stairs!" But "Earth has not anything to show more fair" is the first line of his lines "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802," which my friend Sarah featured on her poetry blog last week.
What happened was that I read the poem, which I hadn't read in a long, long time, and I thought, "I've heard that line somewhere else! And I think I'm hearing it now in Michael Flanders's voice!" And then I had to piece together the rest of the song around it in my mind. Drove me crazy.
i grew up with flanders and swann very young, and then there was a huge gap when i wasn't listening to them but was reading poetry in school and whatnot. it's been hilarious to come back to them as an adult and catch all the allusions. i nearly swallowed my tongue laughing at the "watch the wall, my darlin', while the bedstead men go by."
Oh, thank you. I'm now more humble and less ignorant. :-)
Martha, I once shrieked with laughter in the middle of a German lesson because I'd suddenly understood that the line from Tom Lehrer's song about Hubert Humphrey was actually, "As someone once remarked to Schubert, 'Take us to your *Lieder*.'"
Geoff and I say, "There you sit, smoking that potato" to each other much more often than sane people should. Greenfleeves is great for all sorts of word-whimsy.
And I never hear that horn concerto without hearing, "I once had a whim and I had to obey it/To buy a French horn in a secondhand shop..."
Ooh, lovely.
These days it's bendy buses not Routemasters. Still, at least there's CCTV so when you're stabbed it's recorded.
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