Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BUCOLIC COMEDY: FANTOCHES, by EDITH SITWELL


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BUCOLIC COMEDY: FANTOCHES, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: The stars were like prunes
Last Line: "the saturnine asinine bray of the seas!"


THE stars were like prunes . . .
Wrinkled, the winter breeze.
In nightgowns buffoons
Wrote dusty lampoons.
"Where is Sir Plato
And where is Queen Anne?
Forgotten like Cato!
Less than a man
Is now that disaster,
The mage Zoroaster
Who could not survive our runes, our lampoons,
Withered as stars that are darker than prunes!"
. . . Blown along in her palanquin,
Tattered and thin,
In her quilted red satin,
Miss Pekoe reads Latin.
Like sequins
From Pekin's
Treasuries these
Eyes of Miss Pekoe;
Illogicalisms
Her limbs, and an echo
Her face; syllogisms
Her hat. Astronomical
Trees where swoons
The breeze, hide coxcombical
Lanthorn moons
Set in the trees
Like bird-lime.
The third time,
An old buffoon croons
To a fluttering moth:
"Dust is the cloth
That made Cleopatra,
And every peninsular
House; dark Sumatra,
Miss Pekoe grown insular,
The saturnine asinine bray of the seas!"





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