Tag Archives: Lucius Falkland

Lucius Falkland, ‘Sado-Masochism in Love Poetry’

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Some like being bound up in leather and chains,
Others spanked with a branch from a tree,
But the people who truly get turned on by pain
Try to publish their love poetry.

The poet’s not known for his psychical health:
He wrestles despair, feels dejected,
Not that undisposed to killing himself,
Yet his heart’s work so often rejected.

Sometimes he must wait the best part of a year,
Like an innocent man on death row,
To have to him confirmed his most terrible fear,
For they are quite sadistically slow.

And the hurt they inflict? It’s not over yet.
Do they find wounding fragile souls funny?
Some journals won’t read the submissions they get
If the poets don’t first send them money!

Once it’s crafted and honed and as good as Ted Hughes,
On a par with their earlier choices,
They find a new method to mentally abuse:
They prioritize “marginalised voices.”

The agony felt by a hounded young deer
As he’s brought to the ground by a predator
Is as nothing compared to the suffering and fear
That’s induced in a poet by an editor.

*****

Lucius Falkland writes: ‘I wrote this poem in response to having so many of my love poems rejected by poetry journals. It struck me as absurd that poets experience feelings, including being in love, so intensely that they must process them via poetry, they share the most poignant aspects of their lives with journal editors, and yet they know they will frequently get rejected. It is as though they write about their deepest pain only to then subject themselves to the further pain of being told that they can’t even express their pain properly. ‘Are we poets Masochists?’ I wondered. Naturally, this poem was itself rejected by a number of editors – with one even commenting that he was sympathetic to my plight. before rejecting it anyway because ‘it’s not the right fit’ (euphemism for ‘I don’t like it!) – before being published in The New English Review.”  

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His first poetry volume, The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre, was published in 2025 with Exeter House Publishing. It can be purchased here.

Illustration: “Vinegar Valentine – 05” by BioKnowlogy is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Lucius Falkland, ‘The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre’

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My life had become like a broadsheet,
The Telegraph, maybe The Times:
The financial section—prose sober and neat;
Inflation—the yen falls and climbs.
While reading this daily, and ever more jaded,
By boring discussions of wages,
My newspaper tore, the ink quickly faded:
You ripped your way up through the pages.

The suits on the concourse at Waterloo Station
All noticed my joy and my fright.
My Times underwent a divine transformation
Like someone regaining his sight.
You stood by the clock where they waited for trains,
Familiar, reserved, but with flair.
My journal of record? It went up in flames:
In a flash, I was reading Jane Eyre.

My feelings, so dulled by SSRIs
And age with the wealth of a hovel,
Without any warning felt very alive;
I was suddenly part of a novel.
My wife was now Bertha, enraged in the attic,
Your boyfriend was St. John, I guess.
Attraction was instant, inspiring, emphatic:
This burgundy-nailed governess.

The prose promptly altered: transcendent, noetic,
No longer the stark black and white;
Facts, figures, but beauty so very poetic:
A sunset one Thornfield Hall night.
I’m not quite as brooding as him, that I’m sure,
And you’re not as serious or neat.
The Times had become such a hideous bore,
All it took was for us two to meet.

Within half an hour we both felt so certain
But English restraint and control
Meant it took time to say we were clearly one person,
Each making the other one whole.
I’ve accepted my life’s not The Times but Jane Eyre
And in Brontë my future I’ll find.
Let’s hope if this moves beyond an affair
I don’t get myself burnt and go blind.

*****

Lucius Falkland writes: “This poem (first published in The Society of Classical Poets) recalls how my sometime paramour and I first met and very quickly felt that we had encountered ourselves in each other. Due to the large age gap, her friend referred to me as Mr Rochester, from Jane Eyre. This is how we started referring to each other. Her boyfriend also became known as St John thereafter. It also tries to capture the feeling, when you are deeply in love, that life seems fateful and inherently profound, as though you are just a character in a novel written by someone else. The jocular tone attempts to encapsulate the joy and absurdity of the experience.”

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His first poetry volume, The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre, was published in 2025 with Exeter House Publishing. It can be purchased here.