The news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, has lately turned to the political: Garrison Keillor, the humorist behind “A Prairie Home Companion,” brought his gentle comic style to bear on the campaign of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.
Keillor borrowed liberally from “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe‘s classic 1845 poem of dread and mystery, to tell his own story of the Trump campaign in the runup to the New York primary on Tuesday.
Keillor describes a night at home “once upon a midnight dreary, while I studied social theory,” and hearing a commotion outside. No sooner does he investigate than the cause of the disturbance makes itself known:
In there stepped a stately raven
So elegant and plump
And he entered my library
With an attitude so airy
As he sat down in a chair
He had pulled up there, ker-whump
Quoth the raven, “Donald Trump.” …
And I watched this ugly fowl
Sit and stare at me and scowl
And he hissed at me, “The country’s in a very serious slump
And you cannot help agreeing
That America is seeing
No ordinary being who can lift us from the dump
No ordinary candidate campaigning on the stump
Except one named Donald Trump.” …
You can hear the whole recording here.