Ponyville & Other Poems

by AugieDog

35 - The Ballade of Power and Greatness

Unhurried with measured but frank disdain,
Posterity shoulders the door aside,
The whole of my audience. I refrain
From noticing, stalwart and dignified.
Control is the key, and I've learned to hide
The sweat as it slickens and thinks me scared.
A swirl of my cape, to the stage I stride:
The powerful always arrive prepared.

I start with the usual sparkling rain
To flavor the air till its crisply fried.
Projecting my patter, I won't constrain
Hyperbole, throwing my pasterns wide.
The audience, silent and squinty-eyed,
Increasingly stretches but hasn't glared.
Attention's a currency I'll not chide:
The powerful always arrive prepared.

Performance will bloom in my soul like grain,
A harvest of wonder too long denied.
I pierce to the heart, to the mind and brain,
And batter them sensible, fears untied.
My fakery's honest and won't abide
Mundane little magics my kinfolk shared.
I reach for effects, not the true and tried:
The powerful always arrive prepared.

O alicorn princess who's never died
And shrugged to return to the stage: I've dared.
I've wrestled to triumph with skill and pride.
The powerful always arrive prepared.

Author's Note:

Oh, Trixie, you little vixen!

I've been working on and off for a couple months now, trying to figure out what sort of poem would suit her best. A chant royal, I thought at first, but as the weeks went by and nothing I tried kept working, I came to realize that she's got too much sawdust in her blood to ever settle for being mere royalty.

I cast my myopic gaze about the world of poetic forms, and the ballade leaped out at me, the way it's so strongly associated with dashing rogues like François Villon. She would definitely see herself as belonging to that company.

But then I couldn't decide on a meter: ballades don't have an assigned rhythm like sonnets do, y'see. Another look around, though, I found a couple ballades with this weird stutter-step thing: you gallop along using two triple-beat anapests for half the line, then throw a shoe and end with a couple two-beat iambs.

And there she was.

Comments

[The-Sad-Umbreon]

Great poem

[FanOfMostEverything]

There are few phrases more perfectly Trixie than "My fakery's honest." Exquisite work.

[AugieDog]

8568844
8568922

Thanks, folks!

Now I get to choose four consecutive lines from this poem and use them as the basis for a form called a glosa that Starlight will be writing.

Mike

[Lurks-no-More]

8568922
"The powerful always arrive prepared" is another extremely fitting one. I can totally hear it in her voice!

[TheJediMasterEd]

The world's a stage. The light is in one's eyes.
The Auditorium is extremely dark.
The more dishonest get the larger rise;
The more offensive make the greater mark.
The women on it prosper by their shape,
Some few by their vivacity. The men,
By tailoring in breeches and in cape.
The world's a stage — I say it once again.

The scenery is very much the best
Of what the wretched drama has to show,
Also the prompter happens to be dumb.
We drink behind the scenes and pass a jest
On all our folly; then, before we go
Loud cries for " Author!" ... but he doesn't come.

--Hilaire Belloc

img00.deviantart.net/e95f/i/2017/294/b/2/human_trixie_s_lock_up_trick_by_joeywaggoner-dbrb7d6.png

[PresentPerfect]

Damn, dude.