Poetry Friday - Bungal-Ode

Poetry Friday hosted today at Literary Safari.

This extraordinary ditty, transcribed below in its entirety, was sent to my husband by a colleague. Our neighborhood is lousy with what some people call bungalows and other people call four-squares. We live in one, built in 1922 and still going strong. I love our house, but I'm at a loss when faced with this thing:

Bungal-Ode

There's a jingle in the jungle
'Neath the juniper and pine,
They are mangling the tangle
Of the underbrush and vine,
And my blood is all a-tingle
At the sound of blow on blow,
As I count each single shingle
On my bosky bungalow

There's a jingle in the jungle,
I am counting every nail,
And my mind is bungaloaded,
Bungaloping down a trail;
And I dream of every ingle
Where I angle at my ease,
Naught to set my nerves a-jingle
I may bungle all I please.

For I oft get bungalonely
In the mingled human drove,
And I long for bungaloafing
In some bungalotus grove,
In a cooling bung'location
Where no troubling trails intrude,
'Neath some bungalowly rooftree
In east bungalongitude.

Oh, I think with bungaloathing
Of the strangling social swim,
Where they wrangle after bangles
Or for some new-fangled whim;
And I know by bungalogic
That is all my bungalown
That a little bungalotion
Mendeth every mortal moan!

Oh, a man that's bungalonging
For the dingle and the loam
Is a very bungalobster
If he dangles on at home.
Catch the bungalocomotive;
If you cannot face the fee,
Why, a bungaloan'll do it --
You can borrow it from me!

Burges Johnson
Good Housekeeping (February 1909)

Burges Johnson (1877-1963) was an author, humorist and educator. He had poems and stories published in Harper's, TIME, and the Century, among others, and his book Bashful Ballads is available in Google Books - if you just can't get enough of the relentless meter, archaic nouns (dingle!) and grotesque portmanteau neologisms.