Sententiousness I seriously cannot bear
I cannot abide po-faced pontification
Faced with which I want to pull out my hair
Being more at home in a festive occasion.
Flee the pessimism of the puritan's pulpit
There is more merriment found in carpe diem
When Falstaffian rogues with us carousing sit.
Send cold gravity to its chilling requiem
If you were given the news your end were nigh
No Cromwell roundhead,more cavalier Dartagnan
What better way to go,do you think,,laugh or cry?
Give me every day a mirthful companion.
So haste ye away,you gloomy prophets of doom
And allow us imbibe in a jovial room
Categories:
roundhead, celebration, cheer up, drink,
Form: Sonnet
I let a boy, a Roundhead* boy, to live...
I knocked him down, and said, 'stay down my boy!
You're fourteen, and your mother waits to give
You letters** - HEY THEN! THAT is not a TOY!'
(For he'd stuck me a bit wi' a little knife,)
It only hurted summat, so I took it,
And said, 'stay DOWN! THESE words are worth your life!'
He cried a bit -- I took his hand and shook it,
Then, I pulled out the knife, and gave it back.
And knocked him out, then, and left him for dead,
'You'll wake up well alive, lad!' Then a 'crack'!
A Roundhead* bullet took me in the head.
So, I lay down a bit, to rest me eyes,
And I am lying there still, I must surmise...
* 'Roundhead' was the Kingsmen's name for the Parliamentarian forces of Oliver
Cromwell
** it was not uncommon, after a battle, once the boys were furloughed, for
family to send the boys back with letters for the men who still fought
Categories:
roundhead, courage, death, devotion, irony,
Form: Sonnet
... [into] the oaken box in which the hunted King was secreted....
Capern essayed to descend...
- Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country (1868)
Suppose a poet-postman, full of good Victorian
Embonpoint, should chance to
Step into this house of hiding – a nook unknown to
Questing Roundhead spies – and think to slip
Unseen into the oubliette fitted out
In Cromwell’s days for a king; suppose this very
Poet – more portly in the midriff than Charles
Escaping from his throne – gets caught
Dead-center in the all-too-narrow trap-door gap.
Alas, for all his wriggling, he’s trapped
Longitudinally between floors. What can a poet,
Ill-versed in such historic lore, do but
Taunt the Muses with his long, many-syllabled
Yelps, unrhyming but in vivid metaphor?
Categories:
roundhead, history
Form: Acrostic
On common land,within the wood
Eking a living as best they could,
Betwixt Roundhead & Cavalier,they stood-
These children of the new forest
Adventures filled ,with youthful zest.
(Frederick Marryat-Children of the New Forest)
Categories:
roundhead, childhood, people,
Form: Narrative