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.

  You thought, no doubt, the garden scent
    Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation
  Of love that came and love that went,—­
    Some fragrance of a lost flirtation,
  Born when the cuckoo changes song,
    Dead ere the apple’s red is on it,
  That should have been an epic long,
    Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet.

  Or else you thought,—­the murmuring noon
    He turns it to a lyric sweeter,
  With birds that gossip in the tune,
    And windy bough-swing in the metre;
  Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms
    Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms,
  Round singing mouths, and chanted charms,
    And mediaeval orchard blossoms,—­

  Quite a la mode.  Alas for prose!—­
    My vagrant fancies only rambled
  Back to the red-walled Rectory close,
    Where first my graceless boyhood gambolled,
  Climbed on the dial, teased the fish,
    And chased the kitten round the beeches,
  Till widening instincts made me wish
    For certain slowly ripening peaches.

  Three peaches.  Not the Graces three
    Had more equality of beauty: 
  I would not look, yet went to see;
    I wrestled with Desire and Duty;
  I felt the pangs of those who feel
    The laws of Property beset them;
  The conflict made my reason reel,
    And, half-abstractedly, I ate them;—­

  Or two of them.  Forthwith Despair—­
    More keen that one of these was rotten—­
  Moved me to seek some forest lair
    Where I might hide and dwell forgotten,
  Attired in skins, by berries stained,
    Absolved from brushes and ablution;—­
  But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained,
    Fate gave me up to execution.