English lesson with Jeremy Irons

 

      Façade is a series of poems by Edith Sitwell. Sitwell began to publish some of the Façade poems in 1918, in the literary magazine 'Wheels'. In 1922-3 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Sitwell's protégé William Walton, and it is in this form that Façade is best known.

Sailors come to the drum out of Babylon,

Hobby-horses, foam, the dumb sky rhinoceros-glum

Watched the courses of the breakers'

rocking-horses and with glaucis,

Lady Venus on the settee of the horsehair sea!

Where Lord Tennyson in laurels wrote a gloria free,

In a borealic iceberg came Victoria; she

Knew Prince Albert's tall memorial

took the colours of the floreal

And the borealic iceberg; floating on they see

New-arisen Madam Venus for whose sake from far

Came the fat zebra'd emperor from Zanzibar

Where like golden bouquets lay far Asia, Africa, Cathay

All laid before that shady lady by the fibroid Shah.

Captain Fracasse stout as any water - butt came, stood

With Sir Bacchus both a-drinking

the black tarr'd grapes' blood

Plucked among the tartan leafage

By the furry wind whose grief age

Could not wither - like a squirrel with a gold star-nut.

Queen Victoria sitting shocked upon a rocking horse

Of a wave said to the Laureate, "This minx of course

Is as sharp as a lynx and blacker -

deeper than the drinks and quite as

Hot as any Hottentot, without remorse! For the minx,"

Said she, "And the drinks, you can see

Are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me!".

      Edith Sitwell é uma poetisa inglesa que deixou marca no seu tempo, pois enquanto o início do século XX foi com 'loucos anos 20' na América e miséria na Europa, eis que houve exceções como esta. Lembra os talking-blues dos anos 50 e o rap atual. Lindíssimo.