Name
or title what has he?
Is
he Regent of the Sea?
From
this difficulty free us,
Buffon,
Banks or sage Linnaeus.
With
his wondrous attributes
Say
what appellation suits.
By
his bulk, and by his size,
By
his oily qualities,
This
(or else my eyesight fails),
This
should be the PRINCE OF WHALES.
SONNET
St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford (1819)
All unadvised, and in an evil
hour,
Lured by aspiring thoughts, my son, you
daft
The lowly labours of the Gentle Craft
For learned toils, which blood and spirits
sour.
All things, dear pledge, are not in all men’s
power;
The wiser sort of shrub affects the ground;
And sweet content of mind is oftener found
In cobbler’s parlour, than in critic’s
bower.
The sorest work is what doth cross the grain;
And better to this hour you had been plying
The obsequious awl with well-waxed finger
flying,
Than ceaseless thus to till a thankless vein;
Still teazing Muses, which are still denying;
Making a stretching-leather of your brain.
THE GODLIKE
(1820)
In one great man we view with odds
A parallel to all the gods.
Great Jove, that shook heaven with his brow,
Could never match his princely bow.
In him a Bacchus we behold:
Like Bacchus, too, he ne’er grows old.
Like Phoebus next, a flaming lover;
And then he’s Mercury—all over.
A Vulcan, for domestic strife,
He lamely lives without his wife.
And sure—unless our wits be dull—
Minerva-like, when moon was full,
He issued from paternal skull.
THE THREE GRAVES
(1820)
Close
by the ever-burning brimstone beds
Where
Bedloe, Oates and Judas, hide their heads,
I
saw great Satan like a Sexton stand
With
his intolerable spade in hand,
Digging
three graves. Of coffin shape they were,
For
those who, coffinless, must enter there
With
unblest rites. The shrouds were of that cloth
Which
Clotho weaveth in her blackest wrath:
The
dismal tinct oppress’d the eye, that dwelt
Upon
it long, like darkness to be felt.
The
pillows to these baleful beds were toads,
Large,
living, livid, melancholy loads,
Whose
softness shock’d. Worms of all monstrous
size
Crawl’d
round; and one, upcoil’d, which never dies.
A
doleful bell, inculcating despair,
Was
always ringing in the heavy air.
And
all about the detestable pit
Strange
headless ghosts, and quarter’d forms, did flit;
Rivers
of blood, from living traitors spilt,
By
treachery stung from poverty to guilt.
I
ask’d the fiend, for whom these rites were meant?
“These
graves,” quoth he, “when life’s brief
oil is spent,
When
the dark night comes, and they’re sinking bedwards,
—I
mean for Castles, Oliver, and Edwards.”