Happiness is meat poetry

The Lane Was So Narrow, by Colin Smith, Gloucester

 

 The lane was so narrow

And his back was so wide

That the ox was stuck fast

Until the butcher arrived!

Those old Germanic month names can really play havoc with your poetry

 

Eosturmonath showers bring Thrimilchi flowers.

Happiness is the master-hand

Musick resembles poetry; in each

Are nameless graces which no methods teach,

And which a master-hand alone can reach.

-- Alexander Pope

Happiness is mnemonic calendar verse which actually rhymes

30 days hath September

April, June, and November.

31 the others date,

Excepting February 28.

But in a leap year we divine

February, 29.

or

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November.

When short February's done,

All the rest have 31.

or

    Thirty days hath September,

    April, June, and November;

    Thirty-one the others date,

    Excepting February, twenty-eight;

    But in leap year we assign

    February, twenty-nine.

The earliest known example of the poem dates to approximately 1425 AD:

Thirty days hath November,

April, June, and September.

Of 28 is but one

And all the remnant 30 and 1. 

Happiness is mutton chops

 

 

 Old Cross condemns all persons to be fops,

That can't regale themselves with mutton chops.

-- William King, The Art of Cookery, in imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry (Humbly inscrib'd to the Honourable Beef Steak Club), 1708

When you get right down to it, happiness is domestic independence

"How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,

Our own felicity we make or find:

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,

Glides the smooth current of domestic joy."

The poetry is Oliver Goldsmith's, but Samuel Johnson wrote it.

True Poetry Frees Us From Burdens By Moderating Feelings

"True poetry announces itself thus, that, as a worldly gospel, it can by internal cheerfulness and external comfort free us from the earthly burdens which press upon us. ... The most lively, as well as the most serious works, have the same aim of moderating both pleasure and pain by a felicitous intellectual form."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography, tr. John Oxenford (1891), Book 13

The Patron Saint of Mediocrities Everywhere

Mozart: [about the royal composer's position he did not get] Whom did they choose?

Salieri: Herr Zummer.

Mozart: Herr Zummer? But the man's a fool, he's a total mediocrity!

Salieri: No, no, he has yet to achieve mediocrity. ...

Your... merciful God. He destroyed His own beloved [Mozart], rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory.

I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.

Mediocrities everywhere... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you all.

Amadeus (1984)