O be with me! How dear I am,
Flinging myself from chair to chair.
Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.
For Byron I made pleasing shams
Dressed as squires or Scots lairds;
Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.
But what now avails such flimflam
As we played, our unchaste dares?
O be with me! How dear I am!
For my novels I was also slammed
By vain unlettered aristo types. How unfair!
Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.
Reader, let's meet among the damned
And do as we please, they won't care.
O be with me! How dear I am!
I'll write only paeans and dithyrambs
In hell, I'll be such a good girl there!
O be with me! How dear I am!
Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb!
***
Some notes:
Stanza 2: Lamb sent this snip to Byron
on August 9, 1812.
Stanza 3: Lamb liked to cross-dress
to amuse Byron or to gain access to
him when he was trying to hide from her.
Lamb was a vastly more interesting and
talented person than I've been able to
convey in this poem (sniff, sob.) There's
an excellent biography by Paul Douglass.
Brilliant, with one more stanza than your average villanelle. "For my novels I was also slammed / By vain unlettered aristo types." This is both rare and well done!
Posted by: David Lehman | May 20, 2023 at 10:40 AM
Marvelous, Mitch! Didn’t she and Chas bring us kiddies’ guide to Shakespeare?
Posted by: Summer brenner | May 20, 2023 at 12:13 PM
Summer, I think it was with Mary that Charles wrote the "Tales from Shakespeare."
Posted by: David Lehman | May 20, 2023 at 08:46 PM
Among all the 8.5 million New Yorkers plus the thousands of illegal migrants recently bused into the city, how many of them would know who Lady Caroline Lamb was or even care?
Yes, brilliant poem Mitch, though i couldn't care less about her, either.
Posted by: Sir Bozo the Hobo | May 21, 2023 at 12:18 AM
Bozo, by your criterion, it would be pointless to write a poem about Aristotle or the Medicis or Diderot or "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too."
Posted by: Max Donald | May 21, 2023 at 10:11 AM