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From: George J. Dance@novabbs.com (George J. Dance)
Newsgroups: alt.arts.poetry.comments,rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: My Father's House / George J. Dance
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2025 15:07:10 +0000
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On Tue, 4 Feb 2025 11:29:25 +0000, W.Dockery wrote:

> George J. Dance wrote:
>>
>> My Father's House
>>
>> This is my father's house, although
>> The man died thirteen years ago.
>> They said it would be quite all right
>> To take a drive to see it now.
>>
>> Dad laid those grey foundation blocks
>> And built the whole thing (from a box),
>> Toiling after each full day's work.
>> I helped, though I was only six.
>>
>> Look, here's the back door I would use
>> And here's where I'd remove my shoes
>> To enter; there I'd leave my things
>> And, when allowed, climb up these stairs.
>>
>> In this room I'd wash many a dish,
>> Gaze out this window, and I'd wish
>> To be so many other places.
>> (Wishy-washy? Oh, I guess!)
>>
>> Outside, the garden that he grew
>> Where I would work the summers through,
>> While watching my friends run and play
>> Mysterious games I never knew.
>>
>> That room's all changed; oh, where is it,
>> The one chair I was let to sit?
>> (For boys can be such filthy things.)
>> Which, the corner where boys were put?
>>
>> Oh ... down that hall there is a room
>> Where I'd be shut (as in a tomb)
>> After the meal, to make no noise,
>> To read or play alone, and then
>>
>> Lights out: in bed by nine each night,
>> Some nights wanting to pee with fright,
>> Face and pyjama bottoms down
>> As for my father's belt I'd wait.
>>
>> Oh, if I were a millionaire
>> I'd buy my father's house, and there
>> I'd build a bonfire, oh so high
>> Its flames would light up all the air.
>>
>> ~~
>> George J. Dance
>> from Logos and other logoi, 2021
>
> Here it is, MFH.

Thank you for reposting this poem of mine, Will. While it's true that it
has been discussed a lot over the years, it also true that at least one
person wants to discuss it now; and this would be the appropriate place
to move those comments, rather than leaving them scattered all over the
group. So let's start with this one:

On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 16:15:27 +0000, Michael Monkey Peabrain (MPP) aka
"HarryLime" wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 13:06:00 +0000, George J. Dance wrote:
>>> Why do you lie so much, George?
>>> (That's a rhetorical question, as you've already intimated that your
>>> pathological lying stems from you having been abused as a child.)
>>
>> No, Lying Michael: I have never said, or even "intimated" (!) that I was
>> pathological, lying, or
>> "abused as a child".

> You wrote a "mostly autobiographical" poem detailing the abuses you
> suffered as a child, George.  And you're demonstrating your pathological
> obsession with lying in your trio of denials, listed above.
https://www.novabbs.com/arts/article.php?id=15801&group=rec.arts.poems

HarryLiar has manufactured yet another fake quote; I have never called
this poem "mostly autobiographical" or autobiographical in many ways. I
have distinctly told him in the past that, while some of the speaker's
memories were based on my own childhood experiences, not all of them
were; I was using them in a work of creative fiction, not an
autobiography of any kind. So he lied and made up a fake quote to
support his lie.

The poem is meant to be a dramatic monolgue, in the style of Browning
(His "My Last Duchess" is a good example), meant to get inside the
psychology of a  speaker or persona. The speaker may have experienced
his childhood as "abuse" - HarryLiar calls it that but the speaker
doesn't. The memories of it, though, have stayed on his mind, and he
wants to get rid of those memories (symbolized by burning down the house
at the end).

It's deliberately left to the reader to decide if the speaker actually
had been abused by his father or not. I did structure it, for effect,
from the least to the most abusive-seeming experiences; from having to
use a back door and remove his shoes to enter the house, to doing
household chores, to doing garden work in the summertime, to not being
allowed to use some of the furniture, to having to stay inside alone at
night and be in bed early, to being subjected to corporal punishment.
Adding them together like that, it's easy enough to conclude that the
father had been abusive; but I'll point out that all of those events
were things children commonly experienced 50-60 years ago, and that none
of them were commonly considered abusive.