I was listening to last week's Prairie Home Companion from their website, and I just thought I'd tell y'all they had a very funny English Major skit which lasted maybe three minutes, but they used one of my favorite Yeats poems, which makes it even funnier.

And yes I used "y'all" in a sentence. Bite me.

The skit went like this:


GK: This portion of our show is brought to you by the Professional Organization of English Majors. When it comes to romance, there is nothing so effective as the English language, when it's used by a trained English major. People in the technical fields are at a disadvantage.

TR: Let me just input this thought---- if you think of the heart as a matrix…

GK: If you spend all day doing finance, probably you're going to have a hard time expressing feelings……

TR: I look at this as a win-win situation ---- we take an option on the future and there's no downside for at least 18 months---

GK: Whereas an English major has Shakespeare to draw on, Keats, Shelley, Yeats----…

SS: It's Valentine's Day. Did you forget?

GK: I thought about Valentine's Day when I was alone, when there was nobody, and now that my life is commingled with yours----

SS: I love that word "commingled".

GK: I feel that flowers, chocolate, are so trivial ---- what I want to give you are the embroidered cloths of heaven, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light.

SS: Hold me.

GK: I want to spread them under your feet. Because I am poor, I have only my dreams.

SS: Let me take you upstairs-----

GK: I have to be at work at Burger King in an hour.

SS: Then let me take you to dinner.

GK: Great. A message from the Professional Organization of English majors.



And the poem they're referencing is this:

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

-- William Butler Yeats