Three ballades

A ballade is a lyric poem rhymed ababbcbc ababbcbc ababbcbc bcbc; the last line of each stanza is the same; the final bcbc part is called an "envoi" and is traditionally addressed to a prince. Now you know enough to be going on with. Here are three of my favourites:

Firstly, the Ballade of Illegal Ornaments, by Hilaire Belloc, about the High and Low parties in the Church of England. This was occasioned by a newspaper report of the Bishop of Birmingham (+Ernest William Barnes) telling a priest named Dr Leigh to remove from his church "all illegal ornaments, and especially a Female Figure with a Child". The poem begins by discussing and explaining contemporary events, but ends somewhere quite different.

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Next, Ballade of Suicide by Chesterton. This is fairly well-known. It has the quirk that rhyme a is equal to rhyme c. Again, this has a turn, a change of mood: it starts off jokingly, and turns around in the last stanza. (The prince in this ballade is presumably Satan.)

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Lastly, another by Belloc: the Ballade of Hell and of Mrs Roebeck, which uses the repeated line to great effect at the end.

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(As to my own work: I keep trying to hit the ballade mark and missing it. I have accidentally rhymed them ababcdcd (and again), and ababcbcb. The repeating line rule means it's well-nigh impossible to turn ababcbcb into ababbcbc without a complete rewrite. However, this one is a true ballade.)

I'm not in the book, you know

I was quite distracted by running across a banner online that had the text:

"Promise me you'll never forget me, because if I thought you would, I'd never leave." — Winnie the Pooh

Now, I'm pretty certain (without having looked it up) that this doesn't appear in the books. Perhaps it occurs in the films (of which I have seen none). But if you ask Google, all you get is pages and pages of people saying that it appears in the Pooh canon, or (even more confusingly) that it was written by A. A. Milne. I am wondering whether it's actually a line that sounded Pooh-like to someone and was wrongly attributed and then propagated.

I'm also unsure whether they use "Winnie the Pooh" to mean the book of that name, or the whole canon, or the character of Edward Bear. From the context, I thought they meant the character. But that makes no sense at all, because Pooh could not have said this, since he never left Christopher Robin. It was Christopher Robin who left Pooh.

I am all confused.

Crashingly obvious observation of the day

BBC INTERVIEWER: When the Pope came to Birmingham, you obviously got to spend some time with him – what did you talk about?

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY: [...] and we also like to talk a bit about theology as we're both former professors and we like to go back to that from time to time.

BBC INTERVIEWER: You're both into that kind of stuff.

(from here— he does have some interesting things to say about the recent programme of cuts)