Makepeace Thomas Bounder
| Makepeace Thomas Bounder | |
 | |
| Name | Makepeace Thomas Bounder, "The Poet of the Cabbages" |
| Race | Human |
| Age | b. 1825 UC |
| Occupation | Poet, hoe operator |
| Physical appearance | plump, amiably goofy |
| Residence | Pop 247 |
| Death | 14th August 1905 UC |
| Parents | |
| Relatives | |
| Children | |
| Marital Status | |
| Appearances | |
| Books | The Discworld Almanak |
| Cameos | |
Makepeace Thomas Bounder, "the Poet of the Cabbages", wrote more than two thousand poems, mostly in praise of the sturdy winter vegetables that have made the Sto Plains famous. He was a tireless promoter of the cabbage as a foodstuff, a fabric, and for other purposes, but he was strongly opposed to the potato, which he regarded as unwholesome and debilitating, feelings that were made clear in a pamphlet he produced entitled A Fulmination Against the Hellish Root. Bounder is well remembered by many Rimward of the Circle Sea as "some old guy" and "right, the wossname from erm..."
His poems included:
- "Cabbages"
- "Ode to a Carrot Weighing Three Pounds, Four and One Quarter Ounces, Upon the Making of a Necessary Stew"
- "Oh, Parsnips!"
Bounder wrote steadily until his death; when the tragic explosion took his life he had just begun a piece entitled "On First Looking Into a Five-Year-Old Barrel of My Best Pickled Cabbage".
Annotations
[The Discworld Almanak, p.90] Makepeace's poem "Ode to a Carrot Weighing Three Pounds, Four and One Quarter Ounces, Upon the Making of a Necessary Stew":
- They cut you up, my Mum and Dad
- They do not want to, but they do,
- For all the turnips have gone bad,
- And we must Make a Stew of You...
This a reference to Philip Larkin's 1971 poem "This Be The Verse", famous for its opening line.
Makepeace Thomas Bounder may be a roundabout reference to Joseph Gwyer, a Victorian farmer and would-be poet who possessed the same combination of awful talent, refusal to acknowledge his own ineptitude (he was known as "the MacGonagall of Penge"), and fixation upon a common vegetable that he dedicated his repugnant poetry to. Unlike his Discworld equivalent, Gwyer was obsessed with potatoes but had no real antipathy for cabbages.