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.”