may my mistress catching me in bed with her daughter

[DuploTower]

I was just in the kids section in a bookshop and there was a collection of poems 'to live by', (presumably older kids). I was always quite fond of Roger McGough, but this really bothered me... has feminism turned me into a sour faced bore?

So it's true that even the lovely men want to fuck fuck the daughter of the person they're cheating on their wife with?

I'm being ridiculous arnt I? But I don't want either my son or daughter to read this...

I'm fucking Mary Whitehouse...

Tell me to get a grip?

"Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one "

I’m thinking of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ which is written from the point of view of a nasty character who has just murdered his lover. I don’t think Browning was an actual sadistic murderer himself

My Last Duchess is brilliant too.

I get that it's a poem with silly extremes, but it does bear thinking about I think.

A little like the 'if you no-one would ever know, and you'd never get caught, would you rape someone' question that so many men answered yes to. It's completely forgetting that there's a woman there being raped, a woman there being betrayed, a woman there being used as a prop in the poem.

I'm not condemning the poet, but it's a clear symptom of society that that's one of his examples.

I mean, I'm also not crazy about the poor driver of the red sportscar being implicated. If I were discussing this poem with my kids, I would raise it as something to talk about the morality of.

And I know I sound like a humourless person here, taking a silly poem too seriously, but it is a poem, it is meant to be thought about, talked about, considered. It is OK to do that, and still see the humour in the poem.

...seriously?

First of all, as PP have pointed out, the narrator of a poem and a poet are not the selfsame being.

Secondly, it's essentially a funnier, more self-parodic version of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle", with some Classics drama thrown in for good measure as a PP noted. It's about snatching as much from life as you can and refusing to accept decay and loss. Human beings have equated living with vice for practically as long as they've been around.

Some of you must really struggle when reading no els.

Why are you referring to rape? There's not the slightest suggestion of rape.

So far as the reference to "mistress" I didn't read that in the sense of "cheating on a wife" mistress which the OP did but in an archaic, poetic sense.

Even without knowing the full poem it me think of Marvell and his coy mistress or Donne and his mistress going to bed where mistress simply meant any relationship outside marriage even where the parties are single. I'd bet good money that as a poet McGough intended it to reference Marvell and Donne.

You are missing the point of the poem if you think it needs such a literal analysis.

This rather like decrying Jenny Joseph for wanting to steal stuff and spit when she is old.
I think they are both deliberately using hyperbole, not writing literally.

To be clear I was replying to butteryellow, not Cressida and Barbarian.

This rather like decrying Jenny Joseph for wanting to steal stuff and spit when she is old
I think they are both deliberately using hyperbole, not writing literally

That comparison is so obvious it's almost, but obviously not entirely, unnecessary to point out.

The whole Western literature canon is basically hung on a Christian framework that sees humans as being caught helplessly "halfway between the angels and the apes" - we have the capacity to follow our better natures and be truly noble but also be hamstrung by our baser desires. It's an old, old metaphor to fear "joining the angels" on death and thus to cling to the desires of the apes to try to ward death odd.

And as lass rightly says, poems like Marvell's "To his coy Mistress" are of the same nature - staving off death with sex.

*ward death off, that is.

You would think wouldn't you. But then again, this thread has challenged a lot of my assumptions about other people's experience of poetry.

I like Hunter S Thompson's take - it's just a bit shorter

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow!"

It's a brilliant poem and you're overthinking! It was written in the 60s so a completely different time with a different view on life. Not saying I agree with that view but it's important context.

It is absolutely not written for children though!

Oh and no-one seems to have picked up on the "and fearing for her son" comment. Is it only (imaginary) girls who must be protected from ageing poets?

I'm also inclined to draw your attention to the fact that he wishes his mistress to "throw away every piece but one ". Why aren't we furious about this woman committing necrophilia?

it's the ridiculousness of a104 year old man who thinks he's so virile that he can seduce his mistresses daughter, and furthermore that this would drive his mistress into such a rage that she would kill him, the very idea that such a great effort would be required to kill such an elderly man, and that this elderly man is seen as such a sex symbol that she is compelled to keep his penis after his death

I like the Hunter s Thompsons version except that you know he never envisaged it being a woman who goes out in a blaze of glory
glory is for men, women are there to do the mundane things so that the men are free to get all the glory

Hunter S Thompson can envisaged whatever he likes.

He's not the boss of me now

“Married men live longer than single men. Or does it just seem that way?”

"There is a disarming laddishness to McGough’s best poems, perhaps nuanced by a certain Freudian tendency:

His poems are nets
in which he hopes
to capture girls

Ben Wright in his scholarly work, The Poetry of Roger McGough: the Liverpool Renaissance, insists on the “dark side” of his writing, the vein of melancholy and angst that counterpoints the zany humour and the fluent cheerfulness. He finds a lot of Catholic guilt, predatory machismo, and a certain “war between the sexes”. “He would know more about that than I do,” says McGough, although he admits that Germaine Greer once denounced him for gender stereotyping."

Q-'Married men live longer than single men' or does it just seem that way?
A-It just seems that way to thier wives

I like the Hunter s Thompsons version except that you know he never envisaged it being a woman who goes out in a blaze of glory
glory is for men, women are there to do the mundane things so that the men are free to get all the glory

Why do you make the assumption the character Thompson is referring to must be a man? He might be saying it with reference to himself but the quote is not gendered.

Not for Me a Youngman's Death

Not for me a youngman's death
Not a car crash, whiplash
One more for the road, kind of death.
Not a gun in hand, in a far off land
IED hidden in the sand death

Not a slow-fade, razor blade

bloodbath in the bath, death.
Jump under a train, Kurt Cobain
bullet in the brain, death

Not a horse-riding, paragliding
mountain climbing fall, death.
Motorcycle into an old stone wall
you know the kind of death, death

My nights are rarely unruly.
My days of all-night parties
are over, well and truly.
No mistresses no red sports cars
no shady deals no gangland bars
no drugs no fags no rock 'n roll
Time alone has taken its toll

Let me die an old man's death
Not a domestic brawl, blood in the hall
knife in the chest, death.
Not a drunken binge, dirty syringe
'What a waste of a life' death.

Hunter s Thompson??
oh come on...of course he was thinking about men not women

A little like the 'if you no-one would ever know, and you'd never get caught, would you rape someone' question that so many men answered yes to.

I think you've misremembered that study, that's not the question the men were asked.

"I'm also inclined to draw your attention to the fact that he wishes his mistress to "throw away every piece but one ". Why aren't we furious about this woman committing necrophilia?" (Not sure how to do bold...)

I think because... we can accept that as hyperbole

But a man fantasising about having sex with his mistresses daughter is highly likely...

He’s the creep I always thought he was.