Thursday, December 28, 2006

"A grave disappointment all round"

In reading the humorous “Last Page” feature of the January 2007 issue of Smithsonian magazine - one of my favorite regular magazines - about true-life personals in the London Review of Books, I was delighted to notice a clue (in the third item from the end, box 6453) to James Fenton’s poem “God: A Poem” whose second verse reads:
A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round.
Is all that you’ll get from th’Almighty

Is all that you’ll get underground.

I taught this poem in an Introduction to Poetry class at Oregon State University last winter. It’s reprinted in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, p. 1965. That was fun to find.

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