Funny Words: Poetry

A clever poem about the Bloomsbury group; kind of makes Virginia & Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and rest sound like the cast of a sitcom.

Bloomsbury Snapshot

By Connie Bensley

Virginia’s writing her diary,
Vanessa is shelling the peas,
And Carrington’s there, hiding under her hair,
And squinting, and painting the trees.

Well Maynard is smiling at Duncan,
A little to Lytton’s distress,
But Ralph’s lying down with a terrible frown
For he’d rather be back in the mess.

There’s Ottoline, planning a party–
But Leonard’s impassive as stone:
He knows that they’ll all sit around in deck chairs,
Discussing their own and each others’ affaires,
And forming, perhaps, into new sets of pairs:
And oh, how the bookshelves will groan!

St. Mary’s English Prof. Robin Bates has a key if your Bloomsbury dramatis personæ is, like mine, rusty.