Not even Hallmark Cards would use this one!

"I shall miss you so much when I'm dead,

The loveliest of smiles,

The softness of your body in our bed.

My everlasting bride,

Remember that when I am dead,

You are forever alive in my heart and my head."

I cannot criticise the sentiments.  True, they border on the trite and commonplace but still, they are infused with a rather naive sincerity.  No, it is the poetry of which I complain.  There are four rhymes but not in any particular order, and two of them result from repeating the same word; a careless practice hardly likely to enhance one's trust in the abilities of the word-smith.  The scansion varies all over the place, so we can assume that we are in the realm of  modern 'poetry', or even, post-modern 'poetry', in which rhyme and scansion are considered to be at best, optional extras, and at worst, hazards to be avoided at all costs.

At this point I would like to tease you.  Who do you suppose penned those, er, less than memorable lines?  It sounds like the effort of a fourteen year-old but as it speaks of a bride and implies the writer's imminent death, we must assume a man of some age.  Given the unoriginal, conservative conformity of the sentiments expressed, one might suppose the writer to be, say, a retired accountant, or Bank manager; the sort of chap who, perhaps, in his spare time was the longstanding chairman of his local literary society.

Well, I'm afraid you would be wrong, so let me tell you that those all-too-mortal lines were composed by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (God help us all!), that Titan of Letters, Mr. Harold Pinter.  Honestly, I've read better poetry inside Hallmark cards!

Comments

[JuliaM]

"Remember that when I am dead,

You are forever alive in my heart and my head."

Does Pinter's head have room for that, what with his ego taking up so much space...?

[David Duff]

You might say that, Julia, I couldn't possibly ... oh, yes I could!

Pinter is poodle-faker of monstrous proportions and I am just amazed that he can fool so many people for so long. Those two lines you quote make no sense whichever way you take them.. If you are a rationalist, which I suspect he is, then when you are dead you are dead and that is the end of the matter. If you are a believer in an after life then it is your soul that *might* carry a memory, not your head or your heart which are constructed of matter. What a buffoon!

[dearieme]

Time for this blog to launch the expression "Harry Pinters" on the world, meaning an odious stew of the clumsily incompetent and the bleedin' obvious. What say you?

[David Duff]

Couldn't have put it better myself, 'DM'.