Fell Creatures

I do not like thee, Dr Fell.
Why this is, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well.
I do not like thee, Dr Fell.

It's not as great a leap from Catullus as you might think (Okay, it is.). Tom Brown (you know he had some school days) wrote this in 1680. It was inspired in part by a Latin poem (There's the Catullus connection.) and in part by the existence of one Dr Fell, a clergyman and dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, who very much desired the expulsion of young Tom Brown.

Fell gave Tom a test: to write a poem in the style of an epigram and to translate work by Martial. What came before Tom Brown's (inner or outer) eyes was this:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
Hoc tantum posso dicere, non amo te.

Brown translated this thus:

I don't like you, Sabidius, and I can't say why; all I can say is I don't like you.


Fell paved the road; Brown walked it.

As a child, I knew none of this. When I first sniffed the darker winds of fell, the definitions that went beyond the past tense of 'to fall', I felt a shivery kinship with my predecessor who hadn't liked the doctor.

It is fortunate that I lived in a single-storey apartment, for another I didn't like lived between levels:

When I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.

This, by Hughes Mearns, is one of those malleable pieces whose words change from one collection to the next: go away or stay away; I wish, I wish or I wish that he would. No matter. There he was, waiting to be seen, not on the landing but shadowy and solid on the stair.

Over the years, not entirely to my surprise (having been given an early warning system in the forms of Brown, Mearns, Gorey, Thurber and Addams), I have met my allotted share of men on stairs and fell doctors. By and large, I have to agree that I didn't like them, could not (politely, at any rate) say why, and wished wholeheartedly that they would go away.

To a one, succumbing to time's wearings, they have, to date, obliged.