Tonight a long business dinner with some folks whose software we're buying and tomorrow night a last-minute St. Patty's gig at the bar across the parking lot, so my promised anomaly will have to wait till Saturday. Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about het-met lately (hope the Bush administration doesn't figure out that sonnets are homometrical) and there's been loose talk on a mailing list about loose iambics, so I'll continue my recent morbidity with a heterometrical loose iambic poem about a churchbell-ringer and gravedigger from Thomas Hardy:
The Sexton at Longpuddle
He passes down the churchyard track
On his way to toll the bell;
And stops, and looks at the graves around,
And notes each finished and greening mound
Complacently,
As their shaper he,
And one who can do it well,
And, with a prosperous sense of his doing,
Think's he'll not lack
Plenty such work in the long ensuing
Futurity
For people will always die
And he will always be nigh
To shape their cell.
8:55:10 PM 
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