I was looking for a poem about dogs, and ended up finding a fun one by Dorothy Parker. It's by her! Really!
However, this site I'm linking to here contains two different "analyses" of the poem, and all of lines quoted ARE NOT IN THE POEM. In fact, judging by a pretty thorough search, none of the lines quoted appear on any other webpage.* Conclusion? Both analyses are AI generated. AI analyzes crappy poetry it generated itself!
Amazing. And appalling.
Honestly, I don't know how students are going to be able to navigate this.
*Here's an excerpt:
The poem begins with the speaker addressing her dog, saying "Your dog is not a Lassie, / Your dog is not a Rover; / But I must do my best to see / That you behave him over." The speaker is acknowledging that her dog is not a well-behaved, obedient pet like the fictional Lassie or Rover. Instead, she is resigned to the fact that she must try her best to control her dog's behavior.
"That you behave him over"? OMG, I feel like I'm losing my mind.
My encroaching departure from Facebook has me wondering if I should revive my moribund blog. Not promising anything, but this is an expanded version of a thread I posted on Bluesky. Maybe I'll post from time to time? (I'm otherjimdonahue over on Bluesky, by the way.)
I just went down a wormhole regarding the folk song "She Moved Through the Fair." (Some versions use "Moves," but "Moved" is traditional.) If you never heard it, the song is about a doomed romance; the narrator of the song watches his love moving through a fair, and it's the last time he sees her. She disappears and, it's implied, she dies. In the final verse, her vision -- a ghost? just a dream? -- visits him.
First of all, there's at least some controversy about how "traditional" a song it is. Some say it's an old folk song. Some say the basis may be an old folk song, but a poet named Padraic Colum wrote most of the lyric that we know today. Not getting involved in that -- I don't know the answer. (BTW, some versions leave out the verse that makes it clear the "she" of the title disappears/dies -- making the last verse confusing. Colum said at some point that he forgot to send the next-to-last verse it to the publisher, and it was added to later editions.)
But the thing that intrigues me is a line from the first verse:
"And my father won't slight you for your lack of kind."
That's how most folks sing it. But I'm not sure what "lack of kind" would mean. However, at some time in the late '80s or early '90s, I saw a singer (her name escapes me) at the Bottom Line in NYC perform the song, and she wanted to explain the line "And my father won't slight you for your lack of kine" -- kine, not kind. "Kine," she said, meant "cattle," and the line meant that the parents of the "she" in the song wouldn't mind that that her husband-to-be was poor. (If I remember correctly, she simply wanted to explain the word -- she didn't say "Some people use the word 'kind' there, but they're wrong." To her, "kine" was part of the lyric, period.)
I found another singer (country star Kathy Mattea) who used "kine" and explained the term as meaning "cattle," but also sang the song as "HE Moved ..." -- given the gender switch, she said it meant the the man's parents wouldn't mind if his wife-to-be didn't have a dowry.
For the record, the first published version of lyrics (1909) have "kind," not "kine," and it's titled "She Moved..."
Could it be that Padraic Colum didn't write that lyric in the early 20th cent. as he claimed, and the original folk version had the word "kine," which was an out-of-use word even in 1909?
I don't know! But if someone could explain what "kind" would mean in that line, I'd love to hear an explanation.
PS: It looks like somewhere around 90% of recordings use "kind." (Maybe a little more than that, even.)
