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Richard Burton and Liz Taylor - From Gamma-Rapho

BATTLING BURTONS

Dick and Liz wedded and were divorced twice
Before a brain bleed took his life. By then
The pair had become a joint sacrifice
To the Gods of showbiz – rich businessmen,
Star-struck groupies, paparazzi, from which
They hid in a rented roost, downing rye
(Him) or pills (her), till she became a bitch,
He a fist-swinging bully. Time went by,

Named them, ‘the Battling Burtons’. Their riposte?
Giving fans the fix they’d come to expect:
Brawling in public to the uttermost
Till their last chance for happiness was wrecked.
Yet, dying, he wrote: ‘Come back to me, lover,
With you beside me, I just might recover.’

[Richard Burton and Liz Taylor were married from 1964-74 and again from 1975-6.]

Dylan Thomas with his wife Caitlin Thomas

CAITLIN

On the same evening that Caitlin met Dylan,
Who pledged his love, proposed, led her to bed,
She, in thrall to her tippling hero-villain,
Of poetry and oaths the fountainhead,
Was doomed. Off he sloped from their Cymru cottage
Nightly, fighting the devils sex and booze,
Between which he swung in a twinned besottage,
One hand seeking a brewage, one a cooze.

During his book tour of the USA,
Beer and bacilli rendered her bereft
Who now, almost half of the world away,
Must depart, to claim the corpse that he’d left….
Downward she slowly slid, after the schism,
Into depression and alcoholism.

[Dylan Thomas died in 1976, aged 40. Caitlin, who lived on till 1994, once described their lives together as, ‘raw, red bleeding meat.’ Cymru (pronounced ‘coomry’) is Welsh  for Wales/Welsh. Brewage is slang for beer, cooze for vagina.]

Henry of Anjou (England’s Henry II) and Eleanor of Aquitaine

INCONSOLABLE

Henry the Second didn’t love his queen:
A love-match it was not, but an alliance
Between a tigress and a libertine
Equally ill disposed toward compliance.
In his twenties, he began a liaison
With ‘Fair Rosamund’, a nobleman’s daughter,
Which became so damnably long and brazen,
The queen’s deliberations turned to slaughter.

This caused him to have her removed to prison,
Rosamund to be installed in her stead
And loyalists to heap on him derision;
But, when his mistress died, he hung his head
And wept, and bought for her a lavish tomb,
And crept, inconsolable, to his room.

[Henry of Anjou (England’s Henry II) married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. His affair with Rosamund Clifford began in 1163. Eleanor was imprisoned in 1173 and, shortly thereafter, Henry installed her as his live-in mistress.  She died in 1176, likely as a consequence of Eleanor’s order that she be poisoned. ]

Chopin and Maria Wodziński

SOMEONE ELSE

Chopin had known Maria as a child;
Now she was a black-eyed beauty who painted
And played piano; they were reacquainted
In Dresden, where he briefly domiciled
While the sixteen-year-old became his student.
They fell in love, were privily engaged
But, finding out, her mother was enraged,
Judging the fellow sickly and imprudent,

And imposing a year’s hiatus. Back
In Paris, bound by separation’s fetters
He was buoyed by regular, loving letters
For weeks, until a sudden month-long lack
Gave way to his dismissal, bluntly stated,
Which, he was sure, someone else had dictated.

[Years later, Chopin, still resentful of his unexplained rejection, described Maria Wodzińska’s mother as, ‘Shallow, unscrupulous and heartless.’ By this time, Maria had been married to, and divorced from, a count’s son who was ugly and stupid but happened to be rich.]

Ivan Turgenev and Pauline Viardot

TREASON

Turgenev fell for Pauline Viardot
When, in St Petersburg, he heard her sing.
Determined to ignore the wedding ring,
He gained her dressing-room, after the show 
(Somewhat taken aback by his own gall)
And, on her chaise-longue, made her his maîtresse….
Buoyed up by this unexpected success,
He followed her from concert hall to hall

Across Europe, striving to win her heart,
While his own beat the frantic paradiddle
Of one who finds he’s playing second fiddle,
In the mind of his loved one, to her art….
At sixty, ‘I should have listened to reason,’
He sighed, ‘and rooted out my poor heart’s treason.’

[At twenty-five, budding novelist Ivan Turgenev fell in love with already-famous mezzo soprano Viardot who, although she admitted she couldn’t return her husband’s love, refused to leave him.]

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Peter Austin is a retired professor of English who spends his time writing plays for young people and poetry for adults. Of his second collection, X. J. Kennedy (winner of the Robert Frost Award for Lifetime Contribution to Poetry) said, "He must be one of the best living exponents of the fine old art of rhyming and scanning in English."

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