"The king", Rudyard Kipling

I was reading some people reminiscing about the nineties(!) and how perfect life was back then. I wanted to say, "Romance brought up the nine-fifteen", but then I remembered that this poem is fairly obscure. And that's a shame, so I decided to post it.

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You see the rather unsubtle point. Kipling says that everyone thinks the previous age was golden, and that even if you can't see it, there is romance wherever "heart-blood beat", even in something as newfangled as a steam-train. And as we stand a century later, at this very moment, up and down England, people are running steam railways for the romance of it. On this particular occasion, Kipling has been proved absolutely correct.

Yet another line from Rio

After she had had trouble spelling a word, Rio suddenly said:

"Great Vowel Shift? Huh. I don't see anything great about it. It just seems like a nuisance."

(Further conversations showed that she was aware that "great" in this sense means important, and was making a conscious pun.)

Recognition

I thought I recognised some guy
asleep off Berkeley Square.
His face had such a peaceful look
behind his dirty hair;

his beard, the scabs across his head,
I thought I'd seen before,
if anyone that I would know
was sleeping in a door.

On second thoughts, it wasn't him.
Or, well, I'll never know.
A glance was all the time it took
to pass him in the snow.