Announcement Prayerful and Frolicsomely Playful: Or, a Canticle I Think I'Ll Be

A canticle I think I'll be, A rimed thought, hoary and ancient, Stinking as the dust heaped up empyreal on the hills of The Judean sands; And as dulled and dimmed as an archaic coin tarnish'd. This is what I think I might be. I'd as lief be this as any other you might care to name. Valid is this, my remote and removed claim, And it all began hereon. O, that was an age ago, that remote and bygone time, Rimed with hoar-frost and the whitishness of ancientness, When as blood-soaked, cruciferous hills remote and circumvallatory or else Perhaps circumferential to the great, walled city, itself circumvallatory; When all this began. When this particular beguine to which we've all been dancing lo this many score of years began. It was as a woman bedecked in black on a Sunday morning newly kissed by the auriferous dawn, (A goldener dawn than even that on which she met the man whose coffin she was now appointed to follow in a moribund processional, a macabre and solemn, ceremonial dance of death,) Going down to the fixed graveyard. That day was as the day on which I first deigned to join this, And adopting unto myself the sobriquet, shibboleth "A canticle I think I be" (For I was not permitted to use the full appellation I wished to apply to myself, Owing to some stupid and recondite rule regarding and regulating the use and due conservation of characters: Yet not those as those of the mainstays of literature, no! I mean to say the characters that are synonymous with words and spaces and punctuation and the like,) And here the tale ends, though 'twas not Moschean nor Noahide as I perhaps meant it to be. Oh, well: All's well that ends well. (For was this not an idiotic tale, yet a harrowing one, whose lightest word would harrow up the young blood of any and all who saw it, read it, perused it?)