Keats and Chapman and Keats and Chapman

More homage to Flann O’Brien.  (Today’s hint:  “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by Keats.)

Keats and Chapman and Keats and Chapman

            “Extraordinary fellow, Homer,” said the Baron when his friend and country neighbor had interrupted his reading by entering the library unannounced one forenoon.  “How he makes hay of these petty jealousies indulged in by the queen of the gods.  One would have thought she’d have got used to the old boy’s philandering by now, at any rate.  Sherry?”

            His visitor, after accepting a glass, apologizing for his abrupt though not indecorous entry, and remarking on the poet’s unsettling implication that the grudges of the gods might be as immortal as those who held them, added, “But my dear man, I suggest you decline your gaze to a marital discord more pressing if less Olympian.”

            “Eh, what?” muttered the Baron.

            “When did you last hear from the Baroness?”

            “A fortnight ago, I think.  She was on the point of departing her sister’s establishment in New York for some outlying spot—a town in . . . er . . . Ticktock . . . or Necktick . . . or some such uncivilized native appellation—where I am to write her next.  What discord?”

            “It seems that you have given your wife an insult of epic proportions.”

            “Insulted my wife?”

            “Indeed, yes.  I have it on the incontrovertible authority of mine, whose tireless observation of the matrimonial heavens for signs of significance to wedded mortals has today been rewarded, I’m afraid, by the sighting of an ominous new planet in the form of a letter from her friend the Baroness, now in Connecticut.  I am sent to tell you that her Ladyship, having first taken umbrage at some undivulged word or deed of yours, has seen fit to take next a madcap but nonetheless solemn vow never, barring a formal satisfaction, to converse with you again.”

            “What?  She means to stay in Con . . . Connect . . . ?”

            “Connecticut.  The second ‘c’ is, as the Baroness threatens to become, inexplicably silent.  No.  She will return from America to the peace of this pleasant demesne on schedule, having endured, she reports, more than enough of the inordinate clanging of iron and steel which the pursuit of gold has engendered in that metallic realm—or rather republic.  It is not clear whether the headache has influenced her choice to seek a verbal as well as a pastoral quietude.  But in any case she has sworn that no word of hers shall reach eye or ear of yours until you apologize.”

            “But how have I insulted her?  It can only have been in my last letter.  Let me see. . . . I wrote about the clear weather, the estate.  Nothing there. . . . I had begun reading Homer and mentioned that.  I think I rather went on about the extremes to which Menelaus had felt obliged to carry things in order to retrieve—he and his brother dragging all those utterly uninterested people from their comfortable homes off to a foreign—to war, don’t you know.  I wonder if—she can’t have thought—I mean I had no intention of implying that Menelaus should have let Helen—that a wife is not worth—oh dear me.”

            And now, shocked into silence himself by the unprecedented and full-blown recognition of the power of literature—whether epic or epistolary—to alter the lives of men, and of women, the Baron stared vacantly at the floor for a full minute.  His subsequent awakening to the urgent necessity of determining a course of action by which to appease the wrath of his spouse and assure a pacific reunion when she should re-cross the Atlantic put the Baron into a flutter.

            “I must write to her at once!  Where the deuce did you say she was?”  Then, not so flustered as entirely to have lost his customary philosophical bent, yet sufficiently impassioned to have become for the moment oblivious to the rule of syntax that forbids the post-positioning of prepositions, he added, “What inscrutable state of the feminine mind can have made her think my letter sufficient grounds to fall silent upon?”

            Inverting the order of these two compelling queries in his twofold reply, the Baron’s friend in need earned not only the momentary and somewhat distracted thanks of his host but the undying respect of admirers of verbal conceit from that day to this.  “A pique,” he said.  “In Darien.”

Keats and Chapman Revisited

And now for a little fun from the Look-what-I-wrote-a-long-time-ago Department, with homage to the incomparable Flann O’Brien.  (Hint:  Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii, by Shakespeare.)

Keats and Chapman Revisited

            The Emperor’s new clothes having gone over so well, his beautiful and savvy Empress realized that she would have to have at least one gown made by the same tailors.  She wasted no time ordering it, and she asked to have it delivered to her rooms by the tailors’ apprentice, a handsome and finely built youth, whose considerable attractions, however, did not include an intellect of any proportions whatever.  He was thought too dim to be trusted with stitching, for example, or even with marking hems.  And in spite of his close relation to the larcenous tailors and his daily handling of their unique stuffs, he was convinced, like many a subtler mind among the Emperor’s subjects, that the material he was given to fold and carry was as visible to others as it was invisible to him.  (He thus unwittingly refuted the venerable adage by demonstrating that those who cannot see may perfectly well be as blind as those who will not.)  Even the fact that the cloth was no more sensible to his fingers than to his eyes engendered not a trace of suspicion in his cloudy and credulous mind.

            As for the Empress, obliged as she was to show herself in garments so utterly imperceptible, she wished to show herself first to this youth.  If others saw the clothes that she could not, the honest stupidity of the apprentice would convey as much.  If, on the other hand, the clothes were invisible to others as to her . . . well, she preferred to expose her secret charms where any passions they might arouse would prove rather a pleasure to satisfy than a chore to repel.  (It was such calculations as this, no doubt, which were responsible for her present exalted position and for the linking of her name in the balanced sentences of later court historians with that of her ancient peer, Theodora.)

            The moment came for the empress to present herself in the new clothes.  She bade her ladies in waiting depart and send the apprentice to her.  (No, the ladies did not titter; fearing, as did the others, to be found unworthy their office, they retired with exemplary sobriety.)  After a shivery moment, the tailors’ apprentice entered, bowed, looked at the empress, and waited, his countenance set in a wide-eyed gaze from which it could not be discerned whether he was responding to her sartorial or her natural splendor.  To plumb the murky depths of his mind the Empress asked him whether he would be so kind as to ease a stitch she felt pinching “just here,” pointing to a rather suggestive spot on her delectable anatomy and hoping that the apprentice would take the remark in only one of its two senses, thereby disclosing the truth of her raiment’s visibility.  The apprentice, however, replied, “Madam, I cannot,” leaving her as ignorant as before. 

            “I beg you,” she encouraged him; “I cannot manage to ease it myself.” 

            “Madam,” he replied, “I . . . um . . . I cannot.” 

            Chill, threatened embarrassment, and desire all combined to cause the empress some impatience, and in the vain hope of forcing the youth to reveal his mind to her as conclusively as she feared she had revealed her person to him, she threw to the unusually palpable winds of the drafty castle the caution of double entendre and said, with not a little exasperation, “Surely it cannot be particularly difficult for you to loosen these seams?”

            The apprentice has won a certain immortality for his iambic reply:  “Seams, Madam?  Nay, it is.  I know not seams.”