What was your thought? You waited long.
Sublime or graceful,--grave,--satiric?
A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song?
A tender Tennysonian lyric?
Tell me. That garden-seat shall be,
So long as speech renown disperses,
Illustrious as the spot where he--
The gifted Blank--composed his verses.
THE POET
[Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_]
Madam,--whose uncensorious eye
Grows gracious over certain pages,
Wherein the Jester's maxims lie,
It may be, thicker than the Sage's--
I hear but to obey, and could
Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you,
Some verse as whimsical as Hood,--
As gay as Praed,--should answer to you.
But, though the common voice proclaims
Our only serious vocation
Confined to giving nothings names
And dreams a "local habitation";
Believe me, there are tuneless days,
When neither marble, brass, nor vellum,
Would profit much by any lays
That haunt the poet's cerebellum.
More empty things, I fear, than rhymes,
More idle things than songs, absorb it;
The "finely frenzied" eye, at times,
Reposes mildly in its orbit;
And--painful truth--at times, to him,
Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive,
"A primrose by a river's brim"
Is absolutely unsuggestive.
The fickle Muse! As ladies will,
She sometimes wearies of her wooer;
A goddess, yet a woman still,
She flies the more that we pursue her;
In short, with worst as well as best,
Five months in six, your hapless poet
Is just as prosy as the rest,
But cannot comfortably show it.
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