For lack of anything better to post (Ass-Head doesn't watch movies anymore), a couple of stanzas from the recently rediscovered eighth book of the Faerie Queene, on justice as practiced in the wayward and absurd southern Faerie province of Unaster.
A knight unlike to any Faerie’s childe
Approach’d in grauelike silence from the West;
His leathern armes were all with dust defylde,
And wearie was his stede for lacke of rest;
A star of tinne he wore upon his vest,
Well burnisht like to siluer, and embraylde
To read The Sheriff, as he was addrest;
His eyne a broad-brimm’d leathern helmet veil’d,
And floating on the breeze his long moustachios trail’d.
To mete out iustice was his only stile,
Nor was he wont to dele to any grace;
An hempen cord for hanging treachers vile
He coilèd kept to execute his place;
But euer did he punish first—the case
He trièd after, and from bough suspended
As many inn’cents trew as varmints bace.
By frend or foe thus equally offended,
With wild mistrust the liues of all he met he ended.
Koko: For the past few weeks I've been trying to think of something to write about this marvellous pair of stanzas. But parody this fun and effective needs no response, so why bother? Either you've read way too much Fairie Queene and mortgaged your brain to Spenser or you're poetry's version of a Rubik's Cube. Whichever it is, damn you, my own experiments in 1590s burlesquery look positively Victorian by contrast. Which makes me William Morris to your Chatterton. Fucking haystacks.
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