What do you get when you mix a classical education, a rhyming dictionary, too much soda, and a lot of patience?
I’ve been asked by Jeff Shelley over at Cybergolf to do some more notes and comments about writing it, but here’s a few for now:
18 stanzas, one for every hole on the golf course.
I finished it on my cousin Jason’s birthday, so I dedicated it to him for a birthday present.
Look for references to Jabberwocky and The Lord of the Rings. (Hint: Silmarils are jewels that hold the light of stars…)
Candace is Ben Curtis’s wife’s name.
“Alarum” is an old school romantic poet’s way of saying alarm.
According to Arthurian Legend, “Samite” is what garbed the arm of The Lady of The Lake as she Excalibur aloft from the bosom of the water.
The gaze of the Basilisk kills instantly when it meets the eyes of its victim.
Thanks to SI’s John Garrity, this poem almost never got written! Garrity is one of the guys I really look up to and love learning from in the media tent. The day after the tournament ended, I was kicking around the idea of exploring similarities between St. George and the Dragon and “St. Padraig and The Monster,” but read a Garrity piece where he bemoaned that every scribbler in Ireland was probably trying to find a rhyme for Sergio, so I punted it for a few months.
Tolkien actually provided me with the meter of the poem: 8 lines stanzas, 8 metrical feet each line.
A twist of Percy Byssche Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge provided the rhyme scheme, which goes A-B-A-A-A-B-B-A. Specifically, when you read it note the three As in a row really ratchet up the momentum as you get to the final line of that tercet (that’s what you call three lines, two is a “couplet” and four is a quatrain). Shelley’s poem about the Battle of Austerlitz gave me the idea for the tercets in each stanza, then the following couplet provides some nice counterpoint.
The piece follows the basic classical outline of introduction, exposition, action, climax, denouement.
Ironically, the last stanza I wrote was Padraig’s battle with The Monster, and the last line was line 5 of that stanza: “For Ireland!” he exclaimed!”
There was one stanza that ended up on the cutting room floor, it was the first stanza of the first draft.
The piece was written over four days, in three hour sessions each day. The first day yielded five stanzas – (numbers one, two, seventeen, and eighteen). The second day yielded eleven more; everything in pretty much final form except stanzas 14-15-16. I wrote stanzas 14-15 the next evening and stanza 16 and some minor edits on the last day.
Finally, in stanza ten you’ll see discussion of a blood-red crescent moon that humg low and large in the Michigan sky. Â This strange atmospheric phenomenon occurred Tuesday evening of tournament week and was so unusual and visually arresting, crowds stopped to stare and take photographs.
