"For you I'd burn the length and breadth of sky"

[larryhammer]

In retrospect, an acknowledged incomplete poem is not the best thing to offer for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasent Day, with or without added bardolotry. So to make up for it, another sonnet. Title is with apologies to Flanders & Swann.

"Now 1608, If You Cast Your Minds Back, Was a Very Bad Year for the Theater"

The task: you have a time machine that's stuck --
It jumps four centuries exactly: who
To rescue from Jacobian moil and muck
To poetize for us? Whose death undo?
Will Shakespeare's lines are getting crabbed by then;
Ben Jonson was, now, barely getting going;
There's Beaumont/Fletcher -- but they're boring men --
Or Middleton, or Dekker -- both weak showing;
Sidney and Spencer are Right Out -- both quite dead
As Kit (who'd soon as knife you as perform);
There's Daniel, with his virtues (here I "meh"ed),
And Drayton's lack of vice (and I'm lukewarm) --
So none of these will do; yet -- here's the one:
'Tis by John Donne our verse today's undone.

---L.