‘The Poets have been Mysteriously Silent about Cheese’ GK Chesterton
well, as its Brisish Cheese Week (really!) here’s a little response to GKC:
Poets have been silent about cheese
Because whilst every subject is the message.
Cheese is the very medium of their work.
We drink in language with our mothers milk
But poets curdle words until they bite,
With substance and a flavour of their own:
So Donne is sharp and Geoffrey Hill is sour
Larkin ascerbic, Tennyson has power
(But only late at night, taken with port)
I like them all and sample every sort
from Creamy keats with his mossed cottage trees
tasting the words themselves like cottage cheese
To Eliot, difficult, in cold collations
Crumbling and stuffed with other folk’s quotations..
