As worldwide fans will know I have built my literary renown on the twin-axle of rhythm and rhyme.  Finely wrought turns of phrase coupled with lyrical embellishments have been my signature.

More recently however I have been impressed with the views proffered in Discussions that the quintessence of poetry is brevity; that anyone aspiring to the art should learn to edit and purge, edit and purge, until the work is as bare and stark as a winter sapling (forgive the superfluous simile).

And I’m persuaded; persuaded with the fervour of a zealot.

With this in mind I have taken it upon myself to edit with Cromwellian puritanism many of the over-flowery works of those over-wordy and over-rated poets of the past.

Initially I was drawn (naturally) to that circumlocutary Shakespeare and improved his Sonnet 18 with

“Summer’s day/Thee? No contest”

And then crystallised Kipling’s

“If.  So What?”

Wordyworth becomes
“Loadsa Daffs”

I turned my hand to

“Tyger – you’re a sod to draw”

“Not Brid again?” replaced Masefield’s “I must go down to the sea”

That interminable bird-babble of GMH’s The Windhover became

“Kes!”

Verbosity to the right of him, tautology to the left, The Charge of the Light Brigade I refined to

“Get back, you silly buggers”

Peter Kay inspired

“Flat Share”, replacing Marlowe’s “Come Live with Me and Be My Love”

Whilst Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven will simply be

“Shoo!”

 

From this devotees will glean that from now on the Coopster will be fabricating perfunctory travail of his poems.