While Poetry Unplugged was off schedule for a couple of weeks, I took the time to produce some experimental material for my performance on the big comeback night. As difficulty coming up with fluent end rhymes has always been my biggest restriction in writing poetry in my second language, I decided to seek help from a rhyming dictionary. It turned out to be a brilliant idea; I was excited, like a 5-year-old with a new toy, writing nothing but end-rhyming couplets for weeks. 

I wanted to do a poem in the style of Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd To His Love, the way Sir Walter Raleigh did with The Nymph's Reply To the Shepherd. Mine's called The Passionate Lover To An Artist: 

 

Won't you let me be your muse

When you feel that there is no use

To paint your pictures day to day

Of landscapes, every time the same?

 

Perhaps I'd give you something new

To draw, to mix a different hue

I'll offer tasteful countervail

When your endeavours seem to fail

 

May inspiration lose its reason

Your art face a fruitful season

Make space for all inventive passion

That you might in your paintings fashion

 

A breath of life you would exhale

Arouse each and every detail

Compelling images evoke

With every slightest paint-brush stroke

 

Each morning you would hear my song

I would make you carry on 

All your inner strength seduce

If you let me be your muse

 

I would never leave you cold

Nor your drive would I withhold

We could create, design, devise

Make beauty wake up in your eyes

 

Paint sunsets in the purest gold

Make covers of the skin unfold

All your images educe

If you let me be your muse

 

... You can probably see the influence of the rhyming dictionary there, but I'm glad if I somehow managed to tune into the structure, rhythm and hopefully also the tone of Marlowe's original, and add to it something of my own.

I would've felt biased to refer to Marlowe in a poetry reading but not to Shakespeare; therefore the second poem I performed on Tuesday was called All The World's A Stage.

 

I play out a different role every day

It don't take a lot to entertain this folk

Quite often I think of something to say

Simply for the pleasure to get to provoke

 

Each dress I wear is by costume design

Everything I do is a plot twist planned

Each phrase I speak is a scripted line

From heart you'd receive nothing quite so grand

 

I play out the script before curtains close

If I wore a mask I take it off only then

Never was any good at making art out of prose

You have to wait 'till tomorrow and I'll do it again

 

The people of this town, they pay to have fun

In return they expect nothing too sincere

If I told the truth, they'd say it's overdone

And scoff at the lines of an old sonneteer.

 

I thought the Shakespeare one's quite funny, actually. I enjoyed writing it, and hiding some ironic subtexts there. Both of these are really out of my usual style, I guess it's the artificiality of using a dictionary when writing that makes it more of a craft than an art, and helps getting into character. Always fun experimenting.