AN ODE TO CHEESE

My friend Sarah suggested today that all rhyming is a little bit cheesy. Now, she's a fabulous poet and often lands upon a kind of phrasing and flow that I can only admire. I'm yet to work out how she does that.

Anyway, I found myself thinking about it. Is Sarah right? Is there an inherent cheesiness to rhyming poetry? Do we overlook it when we grind though poems like Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard or Wilfred Owen or Kipling or Keats or any of those rather serious chaps?

Are the nonsense poems that I love so much, the Lears and the Carrolls and the Bellocs, actually an acknowledgment of the cheesiness of poetry, swinging wildly to the ridiculous to cover their cheesy tracks?

I don't know.

What I did think though, is that it might be fun to take the idea of cheesy poetry and write a poem about cheese itself - subverting the question of whether rhyming is cheesy altogether by contrasting it with about as serious a thing as I can think of.

So I did. This is it, and it's really short and really silly and hopefully...


AN ODE TO CHEESE

If the sun should ever stop
And all the world should freeze
You'll find me at my local shop
Devouring all the cheese

If the Earth should slow its pace
And gravity, despair
You'll find me floating out to space
With unwrapped Camembert

If a comet hurtled in
And life had ceased to be
I hope I'd make it long enough
To taste my final Brie

And if I make it through today
I'll be a lucky fella
So long as there is Wensleydale
And good old Mozzarella