If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

quote by Arthur Eddington
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Obituary:
Alphabetical order
British Museum.

haiku by Jonathan Robin (10 January 1993)
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If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

quote by Mikhail Gorbachev
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We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.

quote by Nicholas Lea
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Pagani’s, November 8

Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the very beautiful
Normande cocotte
The eyes of the very learned British Museum assistant.

poem by Ezra Pound
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When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

quote by C.S. Forester
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A Foggy Day

I was a stranger in the city
Out of town were the people I knew
I had that feeling of self-pity
What to do, what to do, what to do
The outlook was decidedly blue
But as I walked through the foggy streets alone
It turned out to be the luckiest day I've known
A foggy day, in London Town
Had me low, had me down
I viewed the morning, with much alarm
British museum, had lost its charm
How long I wondered,
Could this thing last
But the age of miracles, hadn't past
For suddenly, I saw you there
And through foggy London Town,
The sun was shining everywhere
For suddenly, I saw you there
And through foggy London Town,
The sun was shining everywhere

[...] Read more

song performed by Ella Fitzgerald, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin
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Rosetta Stone

To the British Museum in W3
in very different company.
To an Egyptian archaeological mortuary;
dismembered torsos and massive heads,
disjointed arms and shattered legs;
imitations of flesh and bone
in granite, sandstone,
marble and obsidian.
Mirrors of souls buried in oblivion.

There,
the many who swarmed along the Nile
and lived and loved among a
host of enemies, stare
with dead eyes and frozen smile
with a rich, dark hunger
to reawaken in the sun.

Broken friezes, unhinged doors,
fragmented pediments, mosaic floors,

[...] Read more

poem by Brian Taylor
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Women Who Are Well-behaved

Women who are well-behaved
do not make history, and they
take second place to the depraved,
whom history gives right of way,
for though officially the word condemns
the women who’re considered lawless,
they’re given diamonds and gems
for being flexible, not flawless.

Kathryn Harrison reviews “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (“We’re No Angels, ” NYT, September 30,2007) :
Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older? ” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies, ” written in 1405; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More, ” published in 1898; and “A Room of One’s Own, ” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 — all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past, ” but what we choose to remember. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past. Pizan, Stanton, Woolf: three women with “intellectual fathers” and “domestic mothers, ” who were “raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning” and “married men who supported their intellectual ambitions.” For each, her “moment of illumination came through an encounter with an odious book” expressing man’s “disdain” for women. Pizan responded to a 15th- century satire containing “diatribes” against her sex, Stanton to law tomes that set forth the rights of husbands and fathers over their wives and daughters, Woolf to “The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, ” an imagined history representing what she discovered in the reading room of the British Museum.

9/30/07

poem by Gershon Hepner
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that damn Cupid

...who or which is the main topic of this site
in any season, let alone this one in the Northern hemisphere,
as the hormones stir a young man's fancy
and an old man's mind...

It's difficult I find, being a poet, and a scientist by training -
you want finality in the experimental results
but you love the constant mystery and beauty of the world,
never quite reached, never quite expressed.

Take this Cupid. Not the actual one,
but the head of Eros, Venus' very active young assistant
obviously under general orders
but with a very free remit under his blindfold -
or so it seems to us who don't get to see
the universal script if such there be.

He's one of the few 'archaic' treasures of Greek art
neatly plundered for the British Museum
in circumstances not to be enquired into -

[...] Read more

poem by Michael Shepherd
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An Alliterative Amorous Answer

Alliterative Love Letter

Adored and angelic Amelia. Accept an ardent and artless amourist’s affections, alleviate an anguished admirer’s alarms, and answer an amorous applicant’s avowed ardour. Ah, Amelia! all appears an awful aspect! Ambition, avarice and arrogance, alas are attractive allurements, and abase an ardent attachement. Appease an aching and affectionate adorer’s alarms, and anon acknowledge affianced Albert’s alliance as agreeable and acceptable.

Anxiously awaiting an affectionate and affirmative answer, accept an ardent admirer’s aching adieu. Always angelic and admirable Amelia’s admiring and affectionate amourist, Albert
Wit and Wisdom 1826

An Alliterative Answer

Artless Amelia Acme’s answer adamantly admonishing artful Albert Acne’s announced amorous ambitions, and assertive advances, actively advocates appropriate alternatives. Also, attesting abhorrent Albert’s attempted abduction, Amelia asks an adequate aureate award. Advance “ amical ” arrangements are altogether abjured.

Adieu Albert!

[...] Read more

poem by Jonathan Robin
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A Fable For Critics

Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;
Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,
And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;
And, though 'twas a step into which he had driven her,
He somehow or other had never forgiven her;
Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,
Something bitter to chew when he'd play the Byronic,
And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over
By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.
'My case is like Dido's,' he sometimes remarked;
'When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, as _she_ thought-but (ah, how Fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,-
You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress!
What romance would be left?-who can flatter or kiss trees?

[...] Read more

poem by James Russell Lowell
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