Poetry Monday!: "Rules and Regulations" by Lewis Carroll

Written at age 13 for his younger brother and sister: "A short direction / To avoid dejection, / By variations / In occupations, / And prolongation / Of relaxation, / And combinations / Of recreations..."

Here's "Rules and Regulations" (1845) by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), which the young Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote at age 13 for his younger brother and sister:

A short direction
To avoid dejection,
By variations
In occupations,
And prolongation
Of relaxation,
And combinations
Of recreations,
And disputation
On the state of the nation
In adaptation
To your station,
By invitations
To friends and relations,
By evitation
Of amputation,
By permutation
In conversation,
And deep reflection
You'll avoid dejection….

For the rest of my "Sasha Reads" playlist, click here. Past poems are:

1. "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. "The Pulley" by George Herbert
3. "Harmonie du soir" ("Evening Harmony") by Charles Baudelaire
4. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
6. "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova
7. "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
8. "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
9. "Les Djinns" ("The Jinns") by Victor Hugo
10. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
11. "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman
12. "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") by Aleksandr Pushkin
13. "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
14. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats
15. "Je crains pas ça tellment" ("I'm not that scard about") by Raymond Queneau
16. "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot
17. "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
18. "Она" ("Ona", "She") by Zinaida Gippius
19. "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
20. "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
21. "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz
22. "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
23. "My Three Loves" by Henry S. Leigh
24. "Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени" ("Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni", "With my dreams I caught the departing shadows") by Konstantin Balmont
25. "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling

Comments

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Pretty nice! Hadn't known of that before. Thanks.

[bernard11]

Second.

[Vaclav Matthess]

The cadence of this reminds me of the George MacDonald poem from the book "At the Back of the North Wind." It doesn't have a title, but I refer to it by it's first line, "I Know a River" Here's an excerpt:

I know a river
whose waters run asleep
run run ever
singing in the shallows
dumb in the hollows
sleeping so deep
and all the swallows
that dip their feathers
in the hollows
or in the shallows
are the merriest swallows of all
for the nests they bake
with the clay they cake
with the water they shake
from their wings that rake
the water out of the shallows
or the hollows
will hold together
in any weather
and so the swallows
are the merriest fellows
and have the merriest children...

You may find a large portion of it here - it appears in fragments in other parts of the book, if I remember correctly.
https://backofthenorthwind.blogspot.com/2004/09/favorite-george-macdonald-poem.html

[DaivdBehar]

Sacha has a good Parisian accent.

[TKK]

I missed any Parisian accent. But the first stanza brought back fond memories of Adam Sandler's Cajun Man
https://www.youtube[dot]com/watch?v=ibW7wgjrcQs

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

Very early works by great poets and composers are often quite interesting. Here's an aria from an opera by Mozart which was first performed when he (Mozart) was twelve years old:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IrVNFQL4l8

[Nige]

I fell you ddn't quite get the tone and cadence of the first part right, should have felt lighter maybe? I was smiling the rest of the way through, though, and laughed at the end.

[Nige]

But I should add, if off, it was off by a hair. Lovely delivery.