🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2022-07-31 2:13 p.m., W-Dockery wrote:
> George J. Dance wrote:
>>
>> Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
>> July, by Robert F. Skillings
>
>> A very pleasant mo[n]th is this
>>      To be in a country town.
>> The sunlight doth the foliage kiss
>> [...]
>> https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2022/07/july-robert-f-skillings.html
>
>
> "Pleasant mouth"?
>
> A typo or a Edmund Spenser style spelling?

Heh! I'd say it's a typo, though it is an interesting image, when
combined with "kiss" in L3. So I've changed it to "month" on the blog,
and changed it everywhere it's promoted on the web.

Sadly, while it's probably a typo, it's on all the online copies I've
seen -- I've looked at 3, and had to make decide which one to use (as
they vary in whether or not they indent the lines). Yet all of them have
"mouth". And I think I understand why. I must have read the poem 6
times, and each time I read "month" -- and I expect that everyone else
who put it on their site did the same.

The other problem was that there's no authoritative source for the text
online, just websites that appear to have simply c&p'd each other. I
suspect that it's from one of the two anthologies Skillings's son says
he had poems published in, but I haven't been able to find either. If it
was typed in from a print book, that could explain the appearance of the
"mouth."

Thanks for bringing that to my attention here. There is a silver lining,
when I or a reader catches an error like that: unlike the run of the
mill poetry site, it gets corrected. So I'd say, provisionally, that
unlike those other sites, PPB is a place to find a correct version of
the poem.