Set between 'The Big Bang Two' and 'The Hungry Earth'.
All I own is a book of poems. And then I don't even own the poems contained within.
000
Rory had gotten out of the shower about ten minutes earlier and now, dried and dressed, was heading for the consol room when he heard Amy's voice rising and falling in rhythmic meter.
"Then let amorous kisses dwell/On our lips, begin and tell/A Thousand, and a Hundred score/An Hundred, and a Thousand more,/Till another Thousand smother/That, and that wipe off another."
The Doctor asked a question, too quietly for Rory to make out the words from the distance he was from the room, and Amy gave an affirmation.
"How about this, then? Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; –"
"And we are here as on a darkling plain," the Doctor picked up, "Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'! Ooh, that's a good one!"
"Show off!" Amy laughed. There was a rustling sound of pages being flipped, and she began to recite again. "But it is love, my beloved./Its pleasure and pain are boundless, and endless its wants and wealth./It is as near to you as your life, but you can never wholly know it."
"That's…" he trailed off, trying to find the author and title in the sea of information in his old mind, "That's….that's 'The Gardener', isn't it? By Rabindranath Tagore?"
"Very good!" More rustling pages. "Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie," she read, her Scottish accent becoming thicker with each word, "O, what panic's in thy breastie!/Thou need na start awa sae hasty,/Wi' bickering brattle!/I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,/Wi' murd'ring pattle!"
"Too easy," the Doctor scoffed, "Robert Burns' 'The Mouse' is the only poem I know of that could bring out your Scottish-ness like that." Adopting a mocking accent as thick as Amy's had become, he skipped to a later passage in the poem. "But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,/in proving foresight may be vain:/The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,/Gang aft agley,/An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,/For promis'd joy!"
Amy grumbled softly, flipping to a new poem as Rory reached the consol room and leaned quietly against the doorway, as yet unnoticed by both Time Lord and fellow human.
"It was two by the village clock,/When he came to the bridge in Concord town./He heard the bleating of the flock,/And the twitter of birds among the trees,/And felt the breath of the morning breeze/Blowing over the meadow brown." Smirking triumphantly, sure that the Doctor wouldn't recognize the obscure passage, she leaned back in the jump seat and watched him fiddle with some wires under the consol.
"Come on, Pond, give us a challenge!" he chuckled past the sonic screwdriver gripped between his teeth. Carefully attaching two of the wires together, he transferred the screwdriver to his hand in order to answer more clearly. "That was obviously 'Paul Revere's Ride' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Revere was a charming young man; didn't trust me at first, because I've spent so much time with you lot that I sound British, but he warmed up to me in the end!"
Choosing not to comment on that, Amy opened up her poetry book at random and read the first passage her eyes settled on. "Then from the gladdened multitude went up a joyous yell –/It rumbled in the mountaintops, it rattled in the dell;/It struck upon the hillside and rebounded on the flat;/For -, mighty -, was advancing to the bat."
"Oi! That's cheating!" the Doctor complained. "You can't leave out the important bits!"
"For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat." Rory recited. The Doctor and Amy both turned to look at him, surprised, and he shrugged. "That was the only poem I ever actually liked and remembered from the poetry section we did in English class. 'Casey at the Bat', by Ernest Thayer."
"Never took you as a baseball fan, Rory," the Doctor gave the Centurion a curious look as he walked over to sit next to his wife. "It's the American pastime, the English pastime is football or, or rugby, or tea."
"Well there weren't any poems about football or rugby that we learned, and who would write a poem about tea, anyways?"
Trying to stop the argument before it started, Amy quickly began reciting another random poem. "This is the soldier home from the war./These are the years and the walls and the door/that shut on a boy that pats the floor/to see if the world is round or flat./This is a Jew in a newspaper hat/that dances carefully down the wards,/walking the plank of a coffin board/with the crazy sailor/that shows his watch –"
"That tells the time," The Doctor interrupted with the last lines, his shoulders tense, "Of the wretched man/that lies in the house of Bedlam." There was an uneasy silence as Amy internally cursed herself for not checking the content of the poem before she started to read it. "Elizabeth Bishop," he finally said, "'A Visit to St. Elizabeth's'. She had gone to see the poet Ezra Pound in the mental hospital." More silence, as the Ponds were unsure how to respond to that. To their surprise, the Doctor broke the second pause with another poem.
"Whenever Richard Cory went down to town,/We people on the pavement looked at him:/He was a gentleman from sole to crown,/Clean favored and imperially slim./And he was always quietly arrayed,/And he was always human when he talked;/But still he fluttered pulses when he said,/"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked./And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –/And admirably schooled in every grace:/In fine, we thought that he was everything/To make us wish that we were in his place." He stopped abruptly, and Amy, who had been frantically searching through her book to find the poem, gave the last stanza with a voice choked with fear.
"So on we worked, and waited for the light,/And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;/And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,/Went home and put a bullet through his head."
"Doctor, you're not…?" Rory began hesitantly after another long and pregnant pause, "I mean, you don't want to…?"
"Of course not," he spun around to give them a warm smile that seemed forced, "Why would I want to do that? There's still so much to see, so much to do! Just popped into my head, shared it without thinking. I always do that, should really look into developing a mental filter one of these days. A fine little piece of verse by Edwin Arlington Robinson, 'Richard Cory' is. Now," he spun energetically back towards the consol. "Where do you want to go next? I promised you a honeymoon trip, but we got a bit sidetracked on the Space Orient Express, didn't we? So! Honeymoon! Where to?"
Rory and Amy shared a long look before mutually and silently agreeing to let it go for now. "I've always wanted to see one of the famous Rio de Janeiro festivals," Amy suggested.
"Sounds good to me," Rory nodded.
"Rio it is!"
000
No idea how this got so angsty. It was supposed to be just a little fluffy piece based on a book my aunt got me last Christmas; 'The 100 Best Poems of All Time' by Leslie Pockell. Then suddenly the Doctor is all…broody and everyone feels sad because we know that Amy and Rory will never make it to Rio because they end up in Wales and Rory is erased from time. He comes back, of course, but still.
The unidentified first poem is 'Song 5 to Lesbia' by Catullus, if anyone was wondering.