Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
The lizard seeks a drunken frenzy
About JW. My 7/19/22 posting “Panjandrumery” has a section on the life and works of John Wells, on the occasion of his being declared to be “the panjandrum of phonology” (well, phonetics) in the UK, in which I wrote:
JW (born 3/11/39) regularly twits me (born 9/9/40) about being my senior. My position on the matter is that at this stage in our lives the difference amounts to no more than a rounding error, so we’re now effectively the same age.
JW partnered with Gabriel Parsons in 1968; they became civil partners in the UK on 2006; GP died in 2023. GP was a native of Montserrat, a small volcanic island in the Leeward Islands (more details below); for years they moved back and forth between their two families, one in England, the other in Montserrat.
They also traveled the world together, sometimes on tours or cruises, but also just to go places that intrigued them. Throughout all of this, including JW’s talks at conferences, proud appearances with people he’d advised or mentored, and so on, they took photos: of places, often with ordinary people in them; of one or the other of them; of the two of them together, taken by helpful third parties. Vast numbers of photos.
And now JW is playing them back for us.
About Montserrat. From Wikipedia:
Montserrat is a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. It is part of the Leeward Islands, the northern portion of the Lesser Antilles chain of the West Indies. Montserrat is about 16 km (10 mi) long and 11 km (7 mi) wide, with roughly 40 km (25 mi) of coastline.
A significant part of the island is closed off in an Exclusion Zone, because of volcanic activity there,
December 27, 2025 at 3:58 pm |
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
might also be scanned as a dipodic line,
An iguána feásts || on fállen mángoes
Which Beowulf would want to alliterate:
Fear’d iguána feásts || on fállen frúit.
Hwæt!
December 28, 2025 at 11:16 am |
A caution here: not to diagnose zebras when horses would be an adequate account.