Monday, August 24, 2009

Poetry Break: Irene Rapunzel


Found this poem unexpectedly last week and had never read it before, so thought I'd share.

IRENE RAPUNZEL

"Rapunzel, from your chamber
In the air,
Let down the flowing tresses
Of your hair;
From my dappled charger bold
I would clamber as of old
Up that mass of shining gold,
Oh, so fair."

"Dear knight, to my chamber
In the air,
No longer may you clamber
When you care;
For the fashion caught my eye
As the other maids passed by
In the morning—and so I
Bobbed my hair."

by W. A. Hanway

From The Yale Literary Magazine, Volume 82, Issue 7 (April 1917)

And the artwork is by stabstabstab aka Becky Cloonan who does work for various comic books among other things.

(Does the poem make you think of Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald or is that too obscure these days? I'm not that old, really, I just had an old-fashioned education.)

7 comments:

  1. Bernice Bobs Her Hair is the ONLY Fitzgerald story that I truly truly love. I am so glad someone else knows it.

    Beautiful poem by the way. Do you know if Hanway did any other fairy tale work? I did a simple google search but came up with nothing.

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  2. Oh that poem is so cute! x

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  3. I found this looking for something else in Google Books. I doubt there is much by Hanway around, appears to be a student piece.

    Makes me laugh more since I went from years of waist length hair to a bob when I was in college.

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  4. Oh, and I agree that my favorite Fitzgerald is Berniece. The rest simply hasn't aged well for me.

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  5. Nice poem, thanks for share it.
    What really caught my attention it's the picture you put here, I like it a lot.

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  7. Also it is the first time that I read it. I think that My niece could like it because she enjoys everything that it is about Rapunzel.

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