My friend Charles Perry, scholar of Levantine cuisine

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780907325918-1

and LA Times restaurant reviewer, did a nice poetry pastiche some years back:

Beautiful Rêveur

Softly, o'er the twilight,
Steals the silvr'y dawn.
Gently, in the moonlight,
Sleeps the shady lawn.

There my loved one waiting
Weeps in ceaseless grief.
There the sunset's plaiting
Trembles o'er a leaf.

Oh, once my heart went roaming
Where the swallow loves to trill,
Up a streamlet... in the gloaming...
'Mongst the vi'lets on the hill.

But the play of colors blending
In the balmy fields of youth
Stays not Fate's dire sickle wending;
Sates no somber serpent's tooth.

Ah, would that Love's surrender,
Once given, would return
With kisses mild and tender
As a maiden's bow'r of fern

Ere One's sweet misty glances
From 'neath some briny wave
The perfumed air entrances
Seek the solace of the grave!

My Indian maid is wandering aye
Through dreamy vales of noon,
Among the blushing buds of May,
'Neath gushing plums of June.

But One whose brow is furrowed e'er
With cank'ring sorrows drear
Among the restless clouds so fair
Is floating--far, yet near!

--Charles Perry ("Classy Writing at Popular Prices")

The true name of the city is Sankt Pieterburg, but the Communists and Russians have succeeded in fooling the world. My Kyrgyz friend called it Petrograd.

Landor pastiche! Landor pastiche! I want Landor pastiche!!!

Publish it under an assumed name if you must, and then send an email to all of us regular commentators (you have our email addresses, no?) telling us the URL, but let us get it into our hot little hands!

Or be sensible, and post it here on Hat, with a health warning at the top of the post, like, "See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Complete_bollocks (the home of the annotated version of Loomis's "Classic Ode").

Loved the bookstore story! Merry Christmas to both of you, and I hope there's plenty of time for reading this week.

All right, I dug through the deepest recesses of my filing cabinet to find the Landor pastiche—the things I do for my readers!

Alas, Ianthe, thou that wast so free
  Art now bound under by horse-heavy clay,
And that loose hair that so delighted me
  Is shorn at last for the grave Goddess' pay.

No longer mayst thou smile at whom thou wilt
  And take poor lovers' fancy prisoner;
The last wine in the beaker now is spilt
  And gone. Alas, Ianthe, for thy hair!

(Sun. 15 May '77, late afternoon)

I also dug up "To Nature (after reading too much Keats)," which starts "Bringer of gentle warmth and pleasantness..." But I'll spare you that.

Chroniclers of potato rhymes may recall Landor's “Shakespeare in Italy” for:

I'd rather sup on cold potato,
Than on salmon cookt by Plato,