Леди Макбет Мценского уезда
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
finding father-in-law Boris quite densk,
sent him off to his tomb
with a rat-poisoned ’shroom,
shocking neighbors, relations, and friendsk.
-
Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: December 29th, 2020 12:06
- Comment from author about the poem: I better buttress my street cred as a formalist with a limerick. I wrote this one after listening to the opera with an old friend, back in the 1980s. – Dmitri Shostakovich – his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was first performed in Leningrad in 1934. Katerina Lvovna Ismailova poisons her father-in-law Boris Timofeevich Ismailov with edible mushrooms (gribki) to which she has added rat poison. Boris dies almost immediately. She tells him, Well, you had mushrooms late at night. Lots of people die after eating them.
- Category: Unclassified
- Views: 44
Offline)
Comments3
My first ever seen classical limerick. Nice too.
Or perhaps neo-classical, since it's about Shostakovich. I've seen several limericks on MyPoeticSide. By the way, note that MyPoeticSide supports cyrillic - I've already gotten away with Arabic and pointed Hebrew, and seen somebody else use Devanārī (probably Hindi).
I would find any of those a detriment to communication. Believing that poetry is at its best a way of conveying depth of feeling through the written word, using another language etc. to those spoken by the majority of readers here on MPS. As an academic exercise yes to any of those you suggest but is that what poetry is about really?
I don't use such things without providing an immediate translation of the foreign text. I enjoy trying to game the MyPoeticSide text editor, which appears to be fully Unicode enabled. In the poem, it's purely decorative, like a graphic. But you're right, one shouldn't use even brief foreign language quotations without an immediate translation.
I'm rather elastic don't mind getting stretched a bit. I live it, Robert.
It must be limerick day today after weeks without one.
To be able to comment and rate this poem, you must be registered. Register here or if you are already registered, login here.