THE QUALITY OF SPRAWL by Les Murray.
Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl is Hank Stamper in
Never Give an Inch
Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people
Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray
No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Another of Murray's complex poems, full of imagery relating to one theme - possibly also one of his better known pieces. |
[There is a variation on this line in some books: "sprawl is never Calum, who, gagging in the hallway of our house" return]
Hank Stamper appears originally in a book by Ken Kesey called Sometimes a Great Notion
in petto - Etymology: Italian, literally, in the breast, in private, secretly - date: circa 1674
Simon de Montfort - I've been informed that I'd confused an English Simon with a French one, so here's a site to check out the 'real' de Montfort. EarlyBlazon.com. My thanks to Martin Wallace O.P in Australia for helping me get my facts right! He also points out that the words may be mythic, rather than real. See the article at this site (search for: Slay all; God will know His own.)