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The Poet

I Come from haunts of Keats and Burns
I make a sudden sonnet;
As one who sees a lamb, and yearns
To write a poem on it.

I mingle in my boyhood days
With literary rebels
I struggle for my laureate bays,
I babble over pebbles.

And what though life may often seem
Unhappy, drab and hollow?
I write it off as but a dream
And close my eyes and swallow.

I oft forgo my food and rest
With mental torture racked, till
I weave a subtle anapaest
Or snappy little dactyl.

On swift iambic feet I fly
With tricks of rhythm clever:
On such an easy metre I
Could rhyme along for ever.

O'er literary ways I dance
Through doggerel and classic,
With here and there a hopeful glance
At altitudes Parnassic.

For even Wordsworth's stony waste
Of wilderness Siberian
Has oftentimes a little taste
Of water-cress Pierian.

So gather I, through toil and debt,
For my poetic salad,
With here and there a triolet
And here and there a ballad.

With Cowper now I gloom and glide
Through dark and dreary levels,
Or plunge into the swirling tide
Of loose Byronic revels.

I walk the green Elysian lawns
With Grecian gods and goddesses
Or raise the gentle reader's yawns
With tough, long-winded Odysseys.

Or as the Swinburne manner is,
With pessimism weary all,
And toss off his philosophies
Of decadence venereal.

Or else with Blake I foam and prance
In metaphysic shallows;
I slip! I slide!—and end my dance
On some reviewer's gallows.

I burble, burble, as I go
To Lethe's brimming river,
Till claimed by that oblivious flow
I'm swallowed up forever.

—H.W.G.