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Every month or so, a group of disreputable West Norfolk wits meet to get drunk and read uproariously funny PG Wodehouse passages at each other. In March, we made it a Wordsworth Comedy Night instead. A challenge as, for all his beauties and Miltonic grandeur, there are no jokes in Wordsworth.

No intentional jokes that is. His first draft of 'Daffodils' really wandered lonely as a 'cow' until Coleridge - "if I might make a suggestion, Sir"- recommended the more aptly sublime 'cloud'; and the hysterical measuring of a muddy pond and a weed in the notorious 'The Thorn' will bring a snigger to the stoniest face. If I've improvised a couple of parody lines, they are much in the spirit of these and not necessarily distinguishable from the Great Man's own.

Finally, he really did carry his sister rather than his bride over the threshold on his wedding day as she had fainted in church after crying throughout the ceremony and lived with them permanently thereafter (an unacknowledged researcher/co-writer of some of his most famous pieces) and if this isn't farce, I don't know what is.

This track is a sample of a rip roaring evening. We are only sorry we don't have a record of the 1950s comic turns, recitations, jazz poems, daffodil excursion (see picture) complete with tape measure and other treats. Not to mention the beef bourguignon. (I told you not to mention the beef bourguignon).

lyrics

.(mostly by Wordsworth)

My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky!

So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
The child is father of the man
Is married to his sister.

I wander lonely as a cow
That floats on high o’er dales and hills
The Spring has sprung the grass has ris,
I wonder where the birdies is?

Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.

And to the left, three yards beyond
On a moss hill half a foot in height
Not five yards from the mountain path
I see a little muddy pond.

I’ve measured it from side to side
Tis three feet long and two feet wide
And six feet deep and stood beside
A grave man looking like he’d died.

A poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company
For then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.

Oh a slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears,
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course.
With rocks! And stones! And trees!

She died alone and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be
But she is in her grave and oh!
The difference to me.

And when she was up she was up
On a hill above the town
She was three feet four, five stone, but now
She is six feet underground.

credits

from Poachers on the Common (LP), track released April 5, 2022
For a more Romantic view of Wordsworth, visit peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/weirdsworths-lucy

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Peacock's Tale Musical Storytelling Sedgeford, UK

It's all right, folks, we're married. A marriage of melody and rhythm ( flirting with harmony & timbre.) Old married woke folk, indie, Norfolk noir, beat poems, ghazals & Americana for the world from NW Norfolk. Maz lead & harmony vocals, acoustic guitar. Gaz lead & harmony vocals, drum & bass. Traditional tunes with contemporary beats.
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