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An Cruiskeen Lawn By Myles na gCopaleen

This famous satrical column on December 7th, 1940, introduced readers to the first of series of excrable puns involving two English poets.

Myles na gCopaleen's satirical column on December 7th, 1940, introduced readers to the first of a series of execrable puns involving two English poets.

When Keats was a boy he wanted to be a vet. His devotion to animals was shown by the interest he took in the pigeons which flocked around his house. In company with Chapman, the boy next door, he made pets of many of them and trained them to do odd tricks - even to recite odd lines of poetry in a thick foreign accent . . . The science of training pigeons for military and courier duty was then in its infancy, but Keats and Chapman were unrelenting in their efforts and succeeded in producing several first-rate homing birds.

One day Chapman's favourite homing pigeon fell sick and the distressed owner looked to the veterinary-minded Keats for advice. Keats suspected croup. He placed the pigeon on a perch, forced open its beak with a tiny dentist's jaw plug, and peered down its throat with the aid of a flash-lamp.

It is not recorded whether his diagnosis was correct or whether he effected a cure, but shortly afterwards he sat down and wrote the famous sonnet entitled "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".