Ezra Pound wrote a parody of his friend William Butler Yeats' early poem 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree.' Yeats' poem reads:
THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
And Pound responds:
THE LAKE ISLE O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, With the bright little boxes piled up neatly on the shelves And the loose, fragrant cavendish and the shag, And the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases, And a pair of scales not too greasy, And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing, For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Lend me a little tobacco-shop, or install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing where one needs one's brains all the time.
Shameless
Not only have I used Yeats and Pound to save me from writing, but I didn't even stumble upon that nugget myself, I must instead offer an official hat tip Matthew Stibbe.
I write for a living. I write for fun. And now I write to review too. So that's my excuse for shamelessly using other people's brain power on this particular occasion: mine was busy being unneeded for once.