Arthur sent this to me this morning (I admit, I’m not familiar with the commercial):
Meanwhile, inspired in part by your comments about autumn and the neglected month of November, I came up with something of my own.
You are significantly younger than I am, so significantly that you may never have seen the TV commercial with the slogan “Pepperidge Farm remembers,” said in a suitably old-timey New England voice with a faint gerontological whistle that makes the final consonant a sibilant.
Pepperidge Farm
How many have passed, these crisp and cold Novembers?
When you are young and shiny as any penny
How can you know? You’ve yet to learn how many.
But Pepperidge Farm remembers.
How many times have poets rhymed “Decembers”
With “embers”? Many, far too many times!
Go out into the fields and reap the rhymes
That Pepperidge Farm remembers,
You’ll find slant rhymes among them, umbers, ambers,
Off-colored, dun or dusky, fulvous sheaves,
And more among the leaves, among the graves.
Christ! Pepperidge Farm remembers.