“i’m stranded all alone in the gas station of love / and i have to use the self-service pumps”

For Poetry Monday:

To the God of Love, E. G. V. Knox

Come to me, Eros, if you needs must come
    This year, with milder twinges;
Aim not your arrow at the bull’s-eye plumb,
But let the outer pericardium
    Be where the point impinges.

Garishly beautiful I watch them wane
    Like sunsets in a pink west,
The passions of the past; but O their pain!
You recollect that nice affair with Jane?
    We nearly had an inquest.

I want some mellower romance than these,
    Something that shall not waken
The bosom of the bard from midnight ease,
Nor spoil his appetite for breakfast, please,
    (Porridge and eggs and bacon).

Something that shall not steep the soul in gall,
    Nor plant it in excelsis,
Nor quite prevent the bondman in its thrall
From biffing off the tee as good a ball
    As anybody else’s.

But rather, when the world is dull and gray
    And everything seems horrid,
And books are impotent to charm away
The leaden-footed hours, shall make me say,
    “My hat!” (and strike my forehead)

“I am in love, O circumstance how sweet!
    O n’er to-be-forgot knot!”
And praise the damsel’s eyebrows, and repeat
Her name out loud, until it’s time to eat,
    Or go to bed, or whatnot.

This kind of desultory bolt,
    Eros, I bid you shoot me;
One with no barb to agitate and jolt,
One where the feathers have begun to molt—
    Any old sort will suit me.


Knox (1881-1971) was a journalist, light verse poet, and eventually editor of Punch, but is possibly best remembered today as the father of novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. (All three of his children were writers, as were two of his three brothers—two of his brothers were also priests, one Catholic, one Anglican.) (The Catholic priest was the non-writer.)

---L.

Subject quote from One More Minute, Weird Al Yankovic.