| Title : | Madeira, M'Dear | |||||
| Poet : | Michael Flanders | |||||
| Date : | 2 Jun 2005 | |||||
| 1stLine: | She was young, she w... | |||||
| Length : | 54 | Text-only version | ||||
| ||||||
| Your comments on this poem to attach to the end [microfaq] | ||||||
She was young, she was pure, she was new, she was nice
She was fair, she was sweet seventeen
He was old, he was vile, and no stranger to vice
He was base, he was bad, he was mean
He had slyly inveigled her up to his flat
To view his collection of stamps
And he said as he hastened to put out the cat
The wine, his cigar and the lamps
"Have some madeira, m'dear
You really have nothing to fear
I'm not trying to tempt you, that wouldn't be right
You shouldn't drink spirits at this time of night
Have some madeira, m'dear
It's very much nicer than beer
I don't care for sherry, one cannot drink stout
And port is a wine I can well do without
It's simply a case of 'chacun a son gout'
Have some madeira, m'dear"
Unaware of the wiles of the snake in the grass
And the fate of the maiden who topes
She lowered her standards by raising her glass
Her courage, her eyes and his hopes
She sipped it, she drank it, she drained it, she did
He quietly refilled it again
And he said as he secretly carved one more notch
On the butt of his gold-handled cane
"Have some madeira, m'dear,
I've got a small cask of it here
And once it's been opened, you know it won't keep
Do finish it up, it will help you to sleep
Have some madeira, m'dear,
It's really an excellent year
Now if it were gin, you'd be wrong to say yes
The evil gin does would be hard to assess
(Besides it's inclined to affect me prowess)
Have some madeira, m'dear"
Then there flashed through her mind what her mother had said
With her antepenultimate breath
"Oh my child, should you look on the wine that is red
Be prepared for a fate worse than death!"
She let go her glass with a shrill little cry
Crash! tinkle! it fell to the floor
When he asked, "What in Heaven?" she made no reply
Up her mind, and a dash for the door
"Have some madeira, m'dear",
Rang out down the hall loud and clear
A tremulous cry that was filled with despair
As she fought to take breath in the cool midnight air
"Have some madeira, m'dear"
The words seemed to ring in her ear
Until the next morning, she woke up in bed
With a smile on her lips and an ache in her head
And a beard in her ear 'ole that tickled and said
"Have some madeira, m'dear"
-- Michael Flanders
|
We've run a couple of Flanders and Swann pieces before, but neither of them
highlighted one of my favourite things about the duo's songs - the sheer,
unabashed *cleverness* of the lyrics. Like Gilbert before him (and Lehrer
after him), Flanders was adept at leaving the listener simultaneously
entertained by the humour and consciously impressed by the ingenious
crafting of the words. (This is a chancy thing to do in more serious verse,
where cleverness can be distracting and hence detrimental to the central
thrust, but with humour it works very well indeed.)
Today's song has the double bonus of being a particularly neat piece of
extended wordplay, and of working well even divorced from the music. (Some
of my other favourites, like "Misalliance", end up sounding a bit flat when
I try to read them as pure 'poetry'.) It is also, I believe, one of Flanders
and Swann's best-known works, possibly partly due to the Limeliters' having
covered it and brought it to a fresh audience. Needless to say, the music
does add a whole new dimension to it, and I highly recommend getting hold of
the three-CD "The Complete Flanders and Swann" (which isn't, but is well
worth having anyway).
Parenthetically, the figure of speech used in constructions like "he
hastened to put out the cat / The wine, his cigar and the lamps" is 'zeugma'
(I won't go into the fine shades of distinction between zeugma and syllepsis,
but it's worth looking up). Pope was fond of it too, for example in the
following from The Rape of the Lock:
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.
"Madeira M'dear" is, unsurprisingly, often cited in discussions of zeugma;
it remains the best example of the form I've encountered.
martin
[Links]
A biography of Flanders:
http://www.donaldswann.co.uk/flanders.html
And of Swann (whose genius is sadly unapparent on the printed page)
http://www.donaldswann.co.uk/biog.html
More on zeugmas (zeugma? zeugmata?)
http://www.tristate.edu/Community_Read/things_they_carried_tierney.htm
[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1711.html
To subscribe, send a blank mail to <minstrels-subscribe@>.
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/minstrels/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
minstrels-unsubscribe@
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/