True brilliance, my friend, on the edge of madness lies
So that many a great master has lunatic eyes.
'Tis an irregular stair that mounts to the skies
And thus we conclude: it's crazy to be wise!
I posted this for fun as a postscript to a note on the beowulf list today (still the day I wrote it). Friend Dale Harris pointed out in an email connection that ``that brilliance and wisdom do not always walk side by side''. That generated:
Brilliance and Wisdom do not always live together
Although they might seem like birds of a feather
Brilliance and Madness walk blithely two by two
But Wisdom all Madness doth wisely eschew...
Friend Richard Walsh was unhappy (a bit) with the scansion of my poem hastily-grasped, from a while-driving-my-car this morning moment, and had the following improvement to offer:
True brilliance, my friend, near madness lies,
So many a master has lunatic eyes.
'Tis the irregular star that mounts to the skies,
Their burden, is vision, both crazy and wise!
Not bad! Poetry is such fun! You can choose, then whether you prefer his (admittedly better) scan, or like the wink and the joke in the line ``it's crazy to be wise''';-)
Or perhaps one day I'll come back and fix the scansion and retain the last line and maybe even fix the rhyming a bit (which could be improved considerably internally). For the fun of it, though, I think I'll just string them out on this one page...to provide a bit of a history of the evolution of a poem.