The point of taste

     Unhappy poets of a sunken prime! 
     You to reviewers are as ball to bat. 
     They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat
     With Shakespeare:  bludgeons brainingly sublime
     On you the excommunicates of Rhyme,
     Because you sing not in the living Fat. 
     The wiry whizz of an intrusive gnat
     Is verse that shuns their self-producing time. 
     Sound them their clocks, with loud alarum trump,
     Or watches ticking temporal at their fobs,
     You win their pleased attention.  But, bright God
     O’ the lyre, what bully-drawlers they applaud! 
     Rather for us a tavern-catch, and bump
     Chorus where Lumpkin with his Giles hobnobs.

     CAMELUS SALTAT

     What say you, critic, now you have become
     An author and maternal?—­in this trap
     (To quote you) of poor hollow folk who rap
     On instruments as like as drum to drum. 
     You snarled tut-tut for welcome to tum-tum,
     So like the nose fly-teased in its noon’s nap. 
     You scratched an insect-slaughtering thunder-clap
     With that between the fingers and the thumb. 
     It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch,
     Which bade our public gobble or reject. 
     O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked,
     Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch! 
     What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere,
     You dealt?—­the voice austere, the jeer, the sneer.

     Continued

     Oracle of the market! thence you drew
     The taste which stamped you guide of the inept. —
     A North-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept,
     A sturdy and a briny, once men knew. 
     He loved small beer, and for that copious brew,
     To roll ingurgitation till he slept,
     Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept: 
     And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew. 
     At last this dancer to the Polar star
     Sank, washed out within, and overboard was pitched,
     To drink the sea and pilot him to land. 
     O captain-critic! printed, neatly stitched,
     Know while the pillory-eggs fly fast, they are
     Not eggs, but the drowned soul of Hildebrand.

     My theme

     Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt: 
     The song of gladness one straight bolt can check. 
     But I have never stood at Fortune’s beck: 
     Were she and her light crew to run atilt
     At my poor holding little would be spilt;
     Small were the praise for singing o’er that wreck. 
     Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck;
     He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt. 
     Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell
     With other than those votaries she deals
     The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift. 
     I say but that this love of Earth reveals
     A soul beside our own to quicken, quell,
     Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.