Wedding cakes and self-pitying, dirty, sly men
There was a Rainy Day posting at the end of November last year in which the praises of the great ballad Lord Baker were sung. "She asked you send her a cut of your wedding cake / A glass of your wine, it been e'er so strong", sang John Reilly. The Hiberno-English "cut" means "slice" and Robert Graves, who authored I, Claudius 
Talking of "Sex in the City", remember the independent businesswoman Samantha Jones played by Kim Cattrall in the HBO series? She was the one with the avid sexual appetite who required that her sexual partners leave, "an hour after I climax." Anyway, some 30 years before the four Manhattanites Miranda, Charlotte, Carrie and Samantha made it to the small screen, Robert Graves read "A Slice of Wedding Cake" to a student audience at Hunter College in New York. It was a less cynical, more innocent time, as the laughter suggests. Before you listen, read the poem:
A Slice of Wedding CakeWhy have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.Repeat 'impossible men': not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).
Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.Has God's supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.
Robert Graves (1895 — 1985)
Now, listen to Robert Graves reading A Slice of Wedding Cake. What do you say Miranda, Charlotte, Carrie and Samantha? Maybe he did over-value women at the expense of men.
