Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 04, 2020

Put a dust jacket from a Bill O’Reilly book on it if you’re embarrassed to be seen with it.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” —Shakespeare

I have to admit that poetry and I just don’t get along but this one makes some sense.

Among the earliest translated clay tablets is a screed complaining that society is going to the dogs, nobody respects the old ways, and the kids are totally out of control.

Or at least, that’s what I’ve heard.

Yeats’ vision has come true several times to different parts of the world in the past century.

I remember that line from a Spenser novel by Robert Parker.

Misery Before Swine

next he can read a novel by chinua achebe, things fall apart…

Surely the Second Coming is near at hand….

How’d Yeats know about the autonomous anarchy zones?

This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but with a whimper. T S Eliot – The Hollow Men.

Sounds more like a horoscope

You want poetry that’s relevant to today, read poetry that’s being written today.

Dam the Poetry ! Full speed ahead ! Fire up the grill and start burning Burgers and Dogs tis the 4th don’t you know. Happy 4th of July ! … Croc Power !

“T’was brilling…….”

The only poetry I’ve unconsciously memorized is old rock song lyrics and that one about the man from Nantucket.

For an artist who can pull off a humorous, yet timely, thoughtful, and erudite strip like this, why does Pastis resort to so many gags based on third-grade puns?

Dammit, Pastis, I just wasted time trying to figure out a pun using “Yeats” and there wasn’t one.

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” – Shakespeare

WEAR MASKS, YOU TWO

That’s real deep, Goat.

All manner of rough beasts slouching towards a Bethlehem of the mind. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Coney_Island_of_the_Mind

Unless anarchy is the goal….

Nothing changes; it was true of Athens, it was true of Rome, and so it goes…

The world has been ending for, like, ever. We’ll be fine, folks.

Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate 2001-2003 (Who knew the U.S. had a Poet Laureate?):

“The Blue”

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9a/04/12/9a0412efe36d13ec52d098a552815523.jpg

“The Second Coming,” those lines have come to me too, of late.

If you can keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs, you’ll be a Rat.

“The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It seems that we are hearing a lot from the worst.

We, too, shall overcome….

For those who think they don’t like poetry, try Billy Collins.

Introduction to Poetry

By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Care for us! True, indeed !

They ne’er cared for us yet; suffer us to famish and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.

- Coriolanus

“I saw Tom Jefferson drop his copy of the Declaration of Independence and when he went to pick it up, his pants split…Oh my God! ROFLMAO” – Alexander Hamilton

I’ve been quoting that to myself a lot lately.

I like Percy Bysshe Shelley, myself, but his Frankenstein inventing wife even more.

#VoteAnarchy2020 Use the mail-in ballot.

There once was a lady of Nantucket……. Oh never mind.

The recurring prophecy of every seventh generation that always begins but is never quite fulfilled…

TS Eliot’s poetry is in the same vein.

There is nothing new in this world, just history you don’t know.

I couldn’t quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats‘Cause it’s all been said before

Your 9th grade English teacher loves it when you reach out to your fans with real poetry.

The best poetry is good for any occasion. Back in April, I reflected on the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’: ‘April is the cruelest month’. We’re now into our fourth cruel month. In the last panel, we see Rat developing an appreciation for poetry.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumblingFitting the clumsy helmets just in time,But someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Yeats, Eliot, and Auden—the best part of high school English. “What rough beast…”

Thank you for this, Stephan Pastis!

Hey Rat, ever read Dante?

“And they will hate one another and provoke one another to fight. And the despised will rule over the honorable, and the unworthy will raise themselves over the illustrious.And many will be delivered to the few …and the impious will exalt themselves over the brave. The wise will be silent, and the foolish will speak.”

A chilling prophecy from the Apocrypha – part of the Catholic Bible. How is that for “poetry?”

I visit the rat and pig for my daily dose of humor. Can we please return to it?

And beautifully quoted by one of my favorite characters, G’Kar, on Babylon 5. Even hundreds of years later, things are still the same.

Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire /I hold with those who favor fire. /But if it had to perish twice, /I think I know enough of hate /To say that for destruction ice /Is also great / And would suffice. // “Fire and Ice” — Robert Frost

Some poems feel TOO relevant…

Awesome stuff, ehh, Rat?!

How did that mnemonic go? “Bryon, Kelly, and Sheets”? Meh. T.S., Eliot.

Tenser, said the Tensor.

Tension, apprehension,

And dissension have begun.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

There is nothing new under the sun.

Aye, the falconer should get a new falcon and in the meantime get the falcon’s hearing tested, lest it come to a bad end, or something. A relatable lesson for our time indeed. /s

Shakespeare didn’t say it, Yeats did. The whole thing can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

an hour ago.

“The best lose all conviction”/ Yeats’ poem is a sad depiction/ of the state of this nation/ on this celebration/ of our fumbled founding fiction. (i.e. “all men are created equal”)

How wonderful to encounter a quotation from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in my favorite comic strip!

Somehow, “The Second Coming” seems entirely apropos.

a little dated but same sentiment, end of the world. “Two thousand zero zero party’s over, oops, out of time. Tonight I’m going to party like it’s Nineteen ninety nine.” Prince, or the Artist once known as Prince, or the Glyph. Who cares, some of my favorite ’90’s music are his.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are filled with passionate intensity.

deep