The Jonniad (Book I)

The horse of true love never could run straight.
It gallops with a head-weak, limping gait,
In spite of fate, its mane tossed to the winds.
Let me, then, to the marriage of true minds
Admit some management. It must be curbed,
This equine wildness. Find the mane perturbed,
Return it, through some well-manned mane-where-ing,
And set its sights for Jonny Mainwaring.

I can, it seems, rein in my passion’s heat,
And channel through a vein my heart’s dark beat.
My heart’s dark nastiness can be controlled,
And – if, as poet, I might be so bold –
I ask who better warrants this than Jonny?
His hair is curled, his cheeks are bright and bonny,
His body’s perfect for Petrarchan breakdown.
(His body’s softer than the softest Drake down.)
In fact, I feel a little drunk already
On love’s sweet lilac wine: I feel … unsteady.

Jonny! How my heart begins to quake,
Like as a threatened male duck – threatened Drake –
Off of whose back love slides like melted butter;
Whose wings no wind, but worried fear makes flutter.
O! Mainwaring! you’re damaging my heart:
Imagine! by what skills! and by what art!
You analyse each part that makes up Love
And, metamorphic, turn from Drake to dove.
Yet doves bring peace, and no peace you bring me,
No heart’s-ease. Nothing tells me what to be
To win to myself something of your glance –
To teach the horse of love once more to dance.
Perhaps a fulcrum could be found in verse
To turn to wedding-coach my heart’s dark hearse.
Perhaps there is a power in the poise
Of language managed, to make sound from noise.
These words are my materials, my science
Their combination in a tight affiance.
The horse of true love’s hooves on my heart beat,
But passion, if not calm, can be made neat.

~~~

Of Corpus, England’s heartland stretching fair,
The bloodstone of old Oxford, and its seat
Of passions and of intrigue; of the Bear,
And of the Turf, where drunkards drink and eat
With dark addictions shackled to their feet;
Of South Parks Road, and, fanned by winds of fame,
Of Ahmed’s, Mehdi’s, Hassan’s, Adam’s ‘meat’ –
Forebear to sing, my Muse. I set my game
In some land close allied, and yet not quite the same.

This Jonniad of mine, which so with care
I have composed, I offer to your gaze.
Its setting, allegorical, if bare;
Its scope of time perhaps years, maybe days:
It’s not a question which you need to raise.
The subject is of import, though: this Jonny,
This con-man knight by trade, who has more ways
To con and trick than dares a man less conny,
Is sought out by a questing lover blithe and bonny.

This lover seeks him on an endless quest –
What lover? dare you ask. And well you might.
A lover who can turn a word round best
To fit a loving note. A Knight so White,
He’s earned himself the name of the White Knight,
The Knight of Whiteness, as it were. His steed
Is pearly white; his shield is polished bright
In whiteness. Still he follows Jonny’s lead;
Still longs to feel and answer Jonny’s every need.

The questing beast quests not as does this lover,
Nor snarls quite so poetically as he.
The flies round shit with less delight do hover;
Less pleasure in the nectar finds the bee,
And even less in you, my reader, me.
He saddles up, one early Sunday morn,
And rides in chains of love, though seeming free,
To find the one he loves, though long forlorn;
To twine again his hard-furled heart-strings, stripped and torn.

He rides all day, through city, field, and town.
He rides along the river and the road.
He rides up hills, and hills back duly down;
His horse's hooves stop nor for frog nor toad,
Nor stops his mind, unless to pen an ode.
The poetry of happiness, my friend
(For friend you are, though reading be your mode
Of friendship) is a friend to every bend
In every road, and to each sorrow is an end.

The evening lowered o’er the errant youth.
Lonely he galloped, lonely o’er the plain –
Only a lonely quest away from truth,
His quiv’ring steed a quiver with a mane
And all his lonely limbs quiv’ring with pain.
The evening fell, and so he felt his heart
Begin to fail; and, though halfway fain,
He found a sheltered, lonely copse apart
And lay him down to rest his feet awhile, and fart.

His bowels once cleared, in peace he lay awhile;
In peace he lay awhile, under the trees,
And they the stars. He dared a breaking smile
Post-breaking wind. In peace he lay, and ease –
Till all at once he sensed a foreign breeze.
A humming sound, a buzzing round arose
Like as the buzzing of a billion bees,
Or as the death which takes root in your toes,
And up, up, up, in unrelenting hunger grows.

He lay awhile in peaceless agitation,
A worry growing upwards from his feet.
He bode his time in patient expectation
For what fine weather would arise to greet
His resting form, and whether him unseat.
His wait was answered. Rain! Hail! Ice! Wind! Snow!
The snow began to blow, the rain to beat
In torrents. In a flash he saw it so:
The storm would have to rage, and he would have to go.

Yet all at once, a strange, unsettled calm
Stole o’er the copse. The White Knight oped his eyes
And saw the starry sky cleared free of harm
And consternation. No need now to rise:
No need, when peace had overruled the skies.
His spirits sank, and up from out the ground
Came other, woodland spirits, in disguise
As shadows, grasses, flow’rs; and with a sound
Of softest lullaby, they ’gan to dance a round.

At last the White Knight settled into sleep,
And dreams of Jonny’s love into his mind.
His heart and thoughts dipped deeper to the deep,
Dreaming of words unspoken, true and kind,
Or not quite untrue, and not quite unkind.
He looked ahead, to th’ ending of his quest,
And dwelt some time on what he hoped to find
When once his quest was ended, and his chest
Pressed against Jonny’s breast, the heart it loved the best.

The leaves in rustle muffled, hushed the storm;
The rain beat craters in his earthy mould.
The rain beat craters in his earthy form.
Night was awake. He woke, and shivered cold.
He sadly saddled up his horse, feigned bold:
He’d ride all night, if needs must. In a trance
He glanced above to see the clouds unfold
In tow’rs of dancers, and begin to dance
In mockery of this, his dark and cold romance.

The horse adjusted gait, adjusted bit.
“This isn’t really working.” Where the phrase
Arose from, our White Knight dared not admit,
Save that it crossed the span of many days,
Or back or forward, heavy through time’s haze.
His armour caught the dark – now brass, now gold;
His hair, soft-lifted, wafted many ways
Before it settled back into its mould
And seemed to flicker, turning bitter, grey, and old.

Let me adjust the lens a little bit.
This isn’t really working, reader. You
And I both know, although we hate to admit,
That this Spenserian stanza stuff is through.
We’ll need a different form to write Book II.
The White Knight withers, slowly changes shape
And sees the sky transition, hue to hue,
From blue to blue, like some evolving ape
That finally turns man through nature’s crippling rape.