John Whitworth: Condensing Jane and Two More

Condensing Jane

Pride and Prejudice

Poor Elizabeth Bennet, a honey

Who is pretty and witty and sunny,

    Really fancies rich Darcy

    Who acts pretty arsy.

She wins him and marries the money.

Persuasion

Her father’s a terrible prick

And her sisters both make you quite sick.

     How we suffer for Anne

     Who rejected her man

When she ought to have snapped him up quick.

Sense and Sensibility

Marianne, a romantic confessed,

With a sister who knows she knows best,

     Has to practically croak

     And then marry a bloke

In an anaphrodisiac vest.

John Whitworth

Moonshine

Moon in the water and a sleeping swan,

It’s beautiful, you say, and I agree.

It’s surely beautiful, and so are we.

And so are we. Quick now, before it’s gone,

Let’s catch it with a kiss, let’s seal it on

Our beating hearts. Let’s carve it on a tree.

Do you feel it? Yes, you surely do. Do you see?

Let’s write it in the scattering stars that shone

When life was but a dream and earth a crust

A billion zillion years before this night.

We love not as we would, but as we must.

We know it’s beautiful; we know it’s right.

Those stars shine still when we are dead and dust.

Whoever loved who loved not at first sight?

John Whitworth

Natural Selection

Lungfishes clamber from the ooze, 

And over countless aeons lose

Their fishiness and turn to frogs,

And in time’s course to cats and dogs

And elephants and harvest mouses 

And voters in their little houses.

(That should have read, “And harvest mice

And voters in their little hice.”) 

Yeats’s Parable

“I shall arise and go now, and go to a far land,

And there I’ll drink like buggery and kiss the dancing girls.”

He went, Ralph Roister-doister, his father nonwithstand

Ing, and drowned in drink and a young girl’s curls.

He wasted all his substance. He was reduced to rags.

They threw him out upon his arse, with nothing left.

So what remained to him? He had to pack his bags,

And go back home again bereft.

But when his father saw him, he killed the fatted calf,

And held a feast to welcome home the prodigal.

His brother, who had stayed for Daddy, did not laugh.

Oh no. He did not laugh at all.

“You’re so unfair, Big Daddy.” But his father, he said nay.

“The one that was lost is found. Be happy on this day.”

John Whitworth