Does anybody know where
one can get a decent eunuch
these days?
Baggy pants, scimitar, turned-up toes,
are of no consequence.
I only want a big one, strong,
to handle boxes
of feminist writing
and not to find the exercise exciting.

He is to be companion
to a lady among Leavisites
and read to her my book of Larkin poems;
old Oxford toad
is staid enough
but, even he, there is a risk,
if seen through high windows,
might be a bit shocking
to some new blue-stocking.

He should be skilled,
this eunuch chap,
in making tea and toast,
and keeping hot the water bot.
He will, in general, ‘Do’ for her,
and guard her when she goes out on the High
in case she might, naively, buy
something sexy or deathly
by Fiona Pitt-Kethley.

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The Editor
London Review of Books,
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Letters

Vol. 15 No. 14 · 22 July 1993

Re E. Winter’s nunclish poem and your letters column passim:
Rhyme’s dry couplings find G. Ewart even hard put to surpass him,
The solitary substitute for the copulative ‘deathly’
Being nothing but a wet weekend (and dirty) in Llanelli.
But surely it is time to cap, put an end to, this lubricity
And starve Ms F. Pitt-Kethley of the oxygen of pubicity?

This short epistle puzzled but ejaculated pithily
I sign paronomastically, sincerely, and Stan-Smithily.

Stan Smith
Dundee University

send letters to

The Editor
London Review of Books
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address and a telephone number

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