“The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!”
Hamlet’s couplet is a famous one. Who can resist the pithiness, the efficiency, the rhythm and reason of two short rhyming lines?
Cora the Couplet Crocodile can’t.
If you have been to the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry or read much on this website, you know that one of its features is a treehouse in the century-old treehouse next to the museum. A treehouse has consistently been in that tree for around 90 years now, from when my grandfather as a child built the first one.
Over the two years the museum has been open, I’ve pondered names for the treehouse, but I never liked the ones I came up with. Yesterday, I decided it just needed a mascot. I mean, there was a precedent: Peggy the Personification Pig is the ROMP mascot when I am on the road.
A box of wooden crocodile bones was just lying around waiting for someone to put it together, so . . . ta dah: A mascot was born.
In future, you will not be allowed into the treehouse until you have passed Cora’s test. Tell her a couplet of your own making or from your memory, and she will allow entrance.
I will leave you with some couplets from one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him only lacks a cover.
Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight.
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.
Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
What couplet would you recite to Cora? Please comment.
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 