We’re blog newcomers, and several readers complained that we “buried the lead” in our overlong intro to the tale of Shakespeare and popular model Kate Upton... too much ado separating the Bod of Upton from the Bard of Avon (and his brother). And so:
Encore, amends, and adieu...
Kate me no Kate o’er-caissed in finery;
Bejeweled, yes, if colours court cool eyes--
Alert, amused, hinting at deviltry:
Empress new-clothed, as Eve in Paradise.
Sleek liquid motions ripple, ‘neath her robe,
Skin scintillant. Her twin nubbed orbs eclipse
Both Sun and Moon. Her belly rounds the Globe,
Nile’s Queen renewed, gold keel amidst mere ships.
Coiled hips gull knaves, beguile fierce warriors,
While Beauty’s spot makes spindled lawyers parse
Scarce-legal briefs, Pale kings pen ‘Derry aires.
Pull down, I say… I would up-turn her Ars
D’Amour, learn curv`ed opulence, gain lips insatious,
'Til our joint skirmishes end boist’rously Boadicea’s.
Note to Ms. Upton and others: I found this manuscript, a single page only, in the basement of a bankruptcy-emptied house purchased at auction this past Spring; it lay in a pile of old letters, theatre clippings, pages torn from a journal, et cetera--the personal papers of a previous owner, one E. Shagsper, about whom nothing more is known… except that neighbors insist he spoke with the accent of some rural region of England.Of course there is the legend associated with William Shakespeare, of his younger brother Edmund, supposed to have been a fledgling actor whose star was in the ascendent, but who dropped out of sight around 1600. Some say he simply returned to Stratford, others that he died of a fever, and that brother Will in his grief was driven to write Hamlet. One lurid version has him murdered in the streets like poor Kit... that is, Christopher... Marlowe.
I personally favor the tale that Edmund journeyed to America as one of Raleigh’s men, searching for the colonists who vanished entirely from “Roanoke,” that infamous Lost Colony of the Virginia/North Carolina border. It’s certainly possible that Edmund fell in love with the New World, resigned from Raleigh’s service, and joined with the long-lived “savages” of the region, some purportedly hundreds of years old.
But returning to the vanished colonists for a moment: Perhaps that odd word “Croatan,” found carved into a piece of wood, relates somehow to “Kate Upton”? Or to the given name “Katherine” beloved of the Elizabethans? Perhaps the carver was a friendly tribesman who had learned just enough English to mis-hear and then mis-letter the sign some colonist requested. (For that matter, the colonists themselves probably spelled by sounds--“creatively,” let’s say.)
Too fanciful I suppose. But since you are the only Kate Upton of note in this time period, a lively and lovely young woman and social media phenomenon, I thought you might find this poem to be of slight interest, worthy of a passing glance. It is a poor thing, but my own... “foundling,” call it. (Will had his groundlings; you have this.)I remain Ethernet Purveyor of Rarities, Master of Feigned Arts, and “your ‘umbl obed'int sarv'nt” E.S.
