A Plum for Oxford Don
written by: Paul Thwaites
Plummy accents what sweet fruits engage,
Elocuted tongues, loquacious saws,
Rolled round in fluent lingos,
Juicy enunciates of English; Queen’s,
Flattened O’s, locutions of the jaws.
O for a draft of plum juice sour,
Prune pursed to sip on sticky hippocrene,
No kumquats here to stain these purple lips,
Plum mouthed with prosody, you’d rather quaff,
Cup of hemlock and be drained,
Of blue blood, cyanotic, stained.
What shall you taste, an Oullin’s Golden Gage,
Rounding the vowels to elucidate,
Or defect to that green drupe that backs the other school,
Mouthing your A’s, your E’s, your I’s, your O’s your U’s,
Let no colloquial bumptiousness abuse,
Such cut glass articles pronounced quite thus,
Articulate, presumptive, free from fuss?
A plum’s the thing, oolitically rolled,
Round orificial orbits opal stoned,
Of pendant kernels, once the fat is chewed,
Smooth as tonguestone, toadish, bufonite,
Buffoons affect, who want to speak it right.
Sanctimonious Huberts, accents plum,
Oratorically assonant orate,
Sloe bloomed, in glaucous tones, to lubricate,
Humblebragged restraints of bushelled light,
Intonations erudite.
O for a taste of honeyed mirabelles,
Received Pronunciations, well announced,
Ripe and rich and spherically sound,
No damsons in distress, this poesy posh,
Pardon the pun, indeed, it’s just hogwash,
Inferiorly derived to make you blench,
Who is well versed in Latin, Greek, and French.
And can display a haughty eloquence,
Purple as Pershores, bullace tart,
Effectively enunciating, no offence,
Of high aggrandisement or self conceit,
Your accent tremors with a hooray beat,
Cultured as pearls, phonetically to clam,
This oystered world it’s cloistered meme,
Linguistically inspired, your spires to dream.
What tortured dipthongs, culturally stretched,
Jack Horner’s manipulations were far – fetched,
Cast before swine, an allegoric tongue,
Metaphorically becomes a thumb,
Therefore the mouth’s a pie in analogous parle,
Oxonian affectations make me barl,
Speak plain you Don, oh do not be effete,
Uphold your office, toffee- nosed is sweet,
But please, I bid, remove you not that thumb.
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