*
Amphigourie
Qu’il est heureux de se défendre
Quand le coeur ne s’est pas rendu!
Mais qu’il est fâcheux de se rendre
Quand le bonheur est suspendu!
Par un discours sans suite et tendre,
Égarez un coeur eperdu;
Souvent par un mal-entendu
L’amant adroit se fait entendre.
*
Translation:
How happy to defend our heart,
When Love has never thrown a dart!
But ah! unhappy when it bends,
If pleasure her soft bliss suspends!
Sweet in a wild disordered strain,
A lost and wandering heart to gain,
Oft in mistaken language wooed
The skilful lover’s understood.
*
I found this poem and its translation in Literary Frivolities, Fancies, Follies and Frolics (1880) by William T. Dobson, who in turn found them in Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1791–1823). Some lines seem rather loosely translated, but no matter. Dobson writes that the French author Claudine Guérin de Tencin once sang this verse to the writer and scientist Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who was impressed enough to request that she repeat the performance. When she pointed out that the verses were mere nonsense, he admitted that they were “so much like the fine verses I have heard here, that it is not surprising I should be for once mistaken!”
An amphigouri, also amphigourie or amphigory, can be considered a burlesque equivalent of what is known in English as a nonsense poem or nonsense verse. The OED says the word is a learned jocular formation from amphi- (Greek for around, about) and allégorie, where the Greek -agoria means speech or speaking. Alternatively, the latter part of the word may have come from gyros, Greek for circle or ring: like these entities, an amphigouri is well-rounded and attractively presented, but has nothing of substance inside. As Dobson put it, the verse is “richly-rhymed, elegantly expressed, but actual nonsense!”
Nonsense it may be, but my ears prefer it to the non-rhyming, inelegantly expressed nonsense that sometimes passes for meaningful communication.
Ah I had not heard of of amphigourie before. THanks
You’re welcome, Jams! It was new to me too, until yesterday.
Poetry at its peak,
each word of praise
would be too weak.
And it’s a shame
that criticaster
would dare to blame
such genial master
who earneth fame
for all her words.
It really hurts.
[McSeanagall]
McSeanagall
For me is all
What poetry
Should ever be.
Nonsense, you say?
Don’t spoil my day.
Amphigourie
Deserves glory!
Si peu de temps
Un coeur si grand
Un à la fois?
Non, pas pour moi.
C’est en aimant
Plus qu’un poète
Qu’on fait la fête
La vie durant.
Claude
Sean, Claudia: It’s Monday morning and you have already made my week.
It’s been too long since
Anyone
has written nonsense
So unglum
Where now is Lear
His eyes to leer?
And whither Nash
With teeth to gnash?
McGonagall’s
not dead, I see:
McSeanagall’s
His legacy.
Et Claudia,
Bilinguisme subtil!
Concilier,
C’est difficile.
(Mais comme tu en
as réussi.)
Abandoning
This rotten verse
I stop before
It gets much worse.
(Readers who are baffled or beguiled by this bout of unBardness might enjoy a visit to McGonagall Online.)
But what about the
Haiku, man. Have you forgot
Or just ignored it!
Perhaps it is me
Or the influences of
past interests hence gone
Wherein does rhyme for
a poem decide its flow
or give it merit
Interesting, that
entry and translated writ
Scribed upon this page
The language of France
Flows cleanly but it makes no
Sense at all to me
Now I take my leave
And also take with my self
All I know and see
There was a young fellow called Tim
Who wrote some haiku on a whim;
His readers enjoyed
The verse he employed
In haiku, though its form is quite slim.
One syllable less,
and this could easily go
for a fine haiku.
Haiku follows soon
looking for words in the moon
und schlachte ein Huhn.
[Please don’t call me a silly sod,
just needed to be a bit polyglott,
to save the beauty of the ryhme
otherwise it had gone out of the Leim.]
Haiku has a way
To make a blue sky, bluer
Goodbye gray and clouds.
You’re right, Claudia. Ireland was drenched by almost incessant rain again today, but seeing poetry appear on my blog from three different continents helped to blue the grey. Thank you, and thanks Sean, Tim, and Jams.
For a folly euphonic
None of us wrote an epic.
Imagine what you would get
If you would mention Macbet.
The rhyme is correct as the French have a problem to say the h of Macbeth.
Thank you for the fun, Stan. It was also interesting to click on Tim’s blog.