Word: couplets
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...message in the window of a bathroom boutique in London's elegant Mayfair district has a familiar ring. It is a takeoff on a couplet* from 17th century English Poet Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." There is nothing familiar about the bathtub for sale inside. It measures a hearty 24 sq. ft., is meant for two-preferably not square-bathers, and is fast becoming the new style in ablutions for the luxury trade around the world...
...opportunity, leading the oil executives through the Alaska Flag Song, introducing fellow Alaska politicians and screening a color film on the state. The audience was then treated by self-styled Bard of the Arctic Larry Beck to a recital of all 30 dreary stanzas of Black Gold. A sample couplet: "They made their way to Prudhoe Bay/To mine the black gold...
Below his face is a couplet: "To keep Nigeria one is the cause that must be won." The rhyme is meant to encourage Nigerians in their war with break away Biafra, but the poster paper has begun to tatter. The war, which Gow on originally predicted would be "a surgical police action," next week enters its third bloody year...
Alexander Pope left his own question unanswered, but a second look at his heroic couplet suggests that the Age of Reason, of which Pope was the prime English poetic voice, was not as innocent of depth psychology as a post-Freudian age might complacently assume. Pope's sin (in modern usage, his neurosis or maladjustment) is explored with devoted detachment by Peter Quennell in the first of a promised two-volume work on the little cripple whose verses fixed a thousand human insects in Formalin...
...share some female errors fall/ Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all." In the same work, he railed against man's injustice in a deceptively quiet couplet: "The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,/And wretches hang that jurymen may dine...