And while on all sides breaking loose
Her household fled the danger,
Quoth she, “The Devil take the goose,
And God forget the stranger!”
First published in 1842; “tho’”
for “though” in line 44 has been the only
alteration made since 1850.
This Prologue was written, like the Epilogue, after
“The Epic” had been composed, being added,
Fitzgerald says, to anticipate or excuse “the
faint Homeric echoes,” to give a reason for telling
an old-world tale. The poet “mouthing out
his hollow oes and aes” is, we are told, a good
description of Tennyson’s tone and manner of
reading.
At Francis Allen’s on the Christmas-eve,—
The game of forfeits done—the
girls all kiss’d
Beneath the sacred bush and past away—
The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,
The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl,
Then half-way ebb’d: and there
we held a talk,
How all the old honour had from Christmas
gone,
Or gone, or dwindled down to some odd
games
In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired
out
With cutting eights that day upon the
pond,
Where, three times slipping from the outer
edge,
I bump’d the ice into three several
stars,
Fell in a doze; and half-awake I heard
The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,
Now harping on the church-commissioners,
[1]
Now hawking at Geology and schism;
Until I woke, and found him settled down
Upon the general decay of faith
Right thro’ the world, “at
home was little left,
And none abroad: there was no anchor,
none,
To hold by”. Francis, laughing,
clapt his hand
On Everard’s shoulder, with “I
hold by him”.
“And I,” quoth Everard, “by
the wassail-bowl.”
“Why, yes,” I said, “we
knew your gift that way
At college: but another which you
had,
I mean of verse (for so we held it then),
What came of that?” “You
know,” said Frank, “he burnt
His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve
books “—[2]
And then to me demanding why? “Oh,
sir,
He thought that nothing new was said,
or else
Something so said ’twas nothing—that
a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day:
God knows: he has a mint of reasons:
ask.
It pleased me well enough.”
“Nay, nay,” said Hall,
“Why take the style of those heroic
times?
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any
man
Remodel models? these twelve books of
mine [3]
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,
Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt.”
“But I,” Said Francis, “pick’d
the eleventh from this hearth,
And have it: keep a thing its use
will come.
I hoard it as a sugar-plum for Holmes.”
He laugh’d, and I, though sleepy,
like a horse
That hears the corn-bin open, prick’d
my ears;
