Century

 August 23 Word of the Day: Century 

Letrilla: The days of his century were numbered

 

[15^th]

She composed visions botanical

Their print fate pressed mechanical

Their colour butterflies’ capers

Their fade into cloth-head paper

The days of her century were numbered

[16^th]

He took words from everyone’s larder

Scarcely noticed the Armada

Saw how we want and let sin in

We are double inside a twin

Made light of dark with feathered wands

Joked he was more lasting than bronze

Dropped manuscripts upon the floor

Left friends to complete the restore

The days of his century were numbered

[17^th]

He ate the fruit and changed his suit

Kept changing sides and staying mute

All things to all men women too

Thought a pioneer of the zoo

The days of their century were numbered

[18^th]

He spelt out an all-mind God

Rhymings even but he stayed odd

His arguments made perfect sense

Based on assembled evidence

Versions went through ten editions

Deity through mass revisions

Back home his wig got a brush-up

Revolution the gig was up

The days of his century were numbered

[19^th]

She went to Paris, went to Rome

Somehow neither of them was home

Married once but it all went wrong

Married again and got along

Landscapes floated by like subplots

Loose ends then were tied up in knots

Her garden of azaleas

Her brother in Australia

The days of her century were numbered

[20^th]

She enumerated rewards

For all the objects she adored

The Moon that once was walked upon

Telephones that were talked upon

She marvelled at brisk energies

The sights of electricity

And for the persons she revered

Or at least that’s how it appeared

Portraits made of wishful thinking

And the levels she was drinking

The days of her century were numbered

[21^st]

He made sentences it-and-a-bit

Bitten off and chewed by an It

A cud of suddenly phrases

Without readers or their praises

Still he composed against the tide

Going along for the next ride

The days of his century were numbered

 

 

Source of the letrilla line: Osip Mandelstam, quoted from a critical essay about Aleksandr Blok, ‘Blok is described as a man of the nineteenth century who knew that “the days of his century were numbered.”’ In, ‘A history of modern criticism 1750-1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism, 1900-1950’ by René Wellek, Yale University Press, 1991, page 296.