Call them the Bee, for “Big Enlightenment English”:
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron.
It’s a bee that delivers neither sting nor itch,
whose buzzing, while coming up short by a Siren
or two of Homer’s Greek, in defiance
of the comparison, sets bold new terms. Thus: “If
to philosophize is to prepare to die, then
to poeticize is to learn to live!”
Like a verse origami, this folded five – in
which one is born and dies within the next one’s life.
And they work apart from all worldly strife,
though they’ve been known to bicker as to who is queen,
and the sullenness of the climate makes them mean.
Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats.
If they quarrel like schoolboys have them change their seats!
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