Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

AROUND and about the singer his song disperses

He flings to the heavens a crashing mellifluous shout. Vast harmonies mingled for ever of blessings and curses Around and about.

In melody filling and thrilling his voice rings out

In strivings splendidly human. Better or worse is The joy of the poor or the rich, of the lord or the lout; What sirens ever sang sweeter? What wine of Circe's, More quickly dispelled the fumes of a priestly doubt, Than this of the bay-crowned Man who is flinging his verses Around and about?

St. James's Gazette.

:0:

THE NEW JACK HORNER,

THE pigmy and portative Horner,
Whom all men denominate Jack,
Against an approximate corner
Had set his exiguous back.

On his knee, formed of paste that was puffy,
Was a pie they for Yule-tide had made;
Into which his fat fingers to stuff he
No palpable moment delayed.
And his voice told of raptures and roses,
As, plucking a plum from that pie,
He cried (as the legend discloses),
"What a plump pie-ous urchin am I !'
Funny Folks Annual. 1884.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

MARCH: AN ODE.

ERE frost-flower and snow blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight,

The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight;

The breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayed.

Such wonders and glories of blossomlike snow or of frost that outlightens all flowers till it fade.

That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night,

Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made,

March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite.

And now that the rage of thy rapture is satiate with revel and ravin and spoil of the snow,

And the branches it brightened are broken, and shattered the tree-tops that only thy wrath could lay low, How should not thy lovers rejoice in thee, leader and lord of the year that exults to be born.

So strong in thy strength and so glad of thy gladness, whose laughter puts winter and sorrow to scorn?

Thou hast shaken the snows from thy wings, and the frost on thy forehead is molten: thy lips are aglow As a lover's that kindle with kissing, and earth, with her raiment and tresses yet wasted and torn, Takes breath as she smiles in the grasp of thy passion to feel through her spirit the sense of thee flow.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

The Nineteenth Century. March, 1888.

ANOTHER ODE TO MARCH.

(Being a Counterblast to Mr. A. C. Swinburne's rhythmical rhapsody in the "Nineteenth Century." By one who has certainly "learned in suffering" what he endeavours to "teach in song.")

ERE frost-slush and snow-slopping dried up and went, and the horrors of Winter had slid out of sight,

The ways of the wood pavement fouler were far than a claycountry lane on a mucky March night.

The breath of the month of the winds had stabbed us through top-coats and mufflers, and made us afraid.

Such bronchial bothers, such blossomy noses, such frostbitten fingers for man and for maid!

The sea was not lovelier then than the land, each appeared in a dismal and desolate plight;

But the Winter is not so much worse than the Spring-time; each plays up the mischief with pleasure and trade. March, master of winds, is a flatulent fraud, a marshal of banes and a bringer of blight.

And now that the rage of your rhythmical rapture, your revel of rhyming has finished its flow,

Oh, incontinent ALGERNON CHARLES, what the dickens you mean by such rubbish I should like to know.

How, how can you love and rejoice, you, leader and lord of the lyrists of curses and scorn,

In a beast of a month that half drives one to madness, and makes a man wish he had never been born?

Have you shaken the snow from your shoes on a doormat, with frost have your nose and your lips been aglow? Have you met a March wind coming sharp round a corner, your mackintosh drenched and your gingham all torn, And tried to take breath in the nip of North-Easters? No, ALGERNON CHARLES, or you'd never talk so!

(Four verses omitted.)

The body is drenched one dismal moment, the next one's skin is as dry as starch.

Its rains that chill us are most disgusting, and equally so are its gales that parch.

What! kindle mortals to love and laughter by lauding the beastliest winds that blow?

Arouse our fondness for wintry wetness, for choking dust or for blinding snow?

No, no, your lips are eloquent, ALGERNON, set in Apollo's own genuine arch;

But neither the flame that fires your tropes, nor the fervour that setteth your figures aglow,

Shall gammon us into the fatuous folly of making a god of the wind of March!

Punch. March 17, 1888.

LINES A LA SWINBURNE.

I SING of the months of the whirligig years that are fading far out of sight and of sound and of motionless mind; Of the days without dreams and the dreams without days, and the days and the dreams and the dreams and the days grown silent and blind;

Gone mad with the vigor of spring and the blush of the radish new blown in the meadows far kissed by the lips of the Sound:

The maddest and gladdest and saddest and baddest and sweetest, completest and fleetest and neatest of days ever found.

I sing of them often in words that are winding, in adjectives blinding, in dactyles and trochees with cunning combined,

In lines that are long as a sentence of Evarts, in lines on the plan of the Washington Monument deftly designed; With wildering fancy of words and of musical syllables weighted with little of thought and with much less of rhyme,

I cover ten pages a sitting with verse that has value in market, and readily getteth there every time.

And when the idea is the thinnest, new burst from the void of the infinite nothing, the zenith of space where the nebulous ether is pregnant with cobwebs of fancy bestrewn with the dew-drops of slush,

I build up long lines such as never a poet, who was not a crank on the subject of versification, built up for the purpose of drowning a suffering public with torrents of stupid and meaningless gibbering gush.

If the wind and the sunlight of April and August had made of the past and hereafter a single adorable season whose life was a rapture of love and of laughter for all of the maidens and lads,

I'd write you a poem with lines like the city of Rome, and with rhymes on beholders and shoulders; on measure and pleasure; on closes and roses; on sterile, imperil ; remember, September; and hither and thither and whither; on slacken and bracken ; on season and reason; defrauded, applauded; on dwindled. rekindled ; on giving and living; on slumbers and numbers; beholden and golden; on glory and story and Morey; on wizard and gizzard and blizzard; on Blaine and on Maine; and each rhyme would be stuck on the end of a line just like this one I'm writing; and oh, and heyday, and yea, marry, they'd run about eight to the page, and they'd collar the scads.

Harper's Monthly Magazine, June, 1888.

-:0:

TRICOTRIN.

In Pictures at Play (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1888), a picture by J. W. Waterhouse, A. R, A., is supposed to sing the following parody of the " Masque of Queen Bersabe":

I AM the Lady of Shalott,

And if you say you love me not,

I shall reply, I wis,
That Bastien-Lepage has been

Much marked of Waterhouse, I ween,
And the result is this!

The A.R. A. who painted me
Is young and popular, and free
To gratify his whim;
Where on a couch of pain I lay,
He came and called me up one day,
And bade me follow him.
In strange attire he vestured me,
Yea, in the silks of Liberty,

He set me thus afloat;

He bade me seem to have the shakes,
And ope my mouth as one that takes
A high and hopeless note.
And painting merely what he saw,
According to the last-found law

Of values and of tones,

He made me, much to my amaze,
A thing whereon the public gaze,
And mock me for the nones.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

I hung my laurel'd head,
Down on my lyre and said:

"What answer does my sovereign, Freedom, make? And in the air I heard

Not even a whisper'd word

From her for whom my very lungs do ache,
And as an addled egg is, is my brain :
Wherefore for her most royal and holy sake
I think I will behowl her once again.
"Hear me, O goddess! for it indeed is I
That call thee, at thy knees,
And don't be frightened, please,
At the many things I shall adjure thee by.
Come to us, bright, in clear re-arisen ascendency,
Loosen o'er us all thine orient oriflamme !

By the power Mat Arnold calls: 'A stream of tendency,'
By the Christianity we have proved a sham,

[ocr errors][merged small]

We thy singers, we thy sons that work thee glory
With the unburnt offerings of our worthless verses
Heaped on thy shrine, adjure thee and adore thee:
I, the clamouring herd's choragus, I implore thee:
By all the things that we bemire with curses-
That is, by all the holy things that are,
Rise and make manifest upon us thy mercies,
Rise o'er us all a large and lonely star.

For the night is now far spent: the air gives warning
With a dewy stir and chillness of the morning,
And the wan dark whitens on the eastern hill.
Burn through the east, grow large, and lighten, until
In the saftron of the sunrise we discern thee

Shining and trembling like a tear of gladness.
Draw near to us, we will love thee, we will learn thee-
Learn thee to the heart, and love thee even to madness,
If thou wilt only 'hear us in our crying

Across the night,

Conjuring thee by this our rhythmic sighing

Our songs which might

Have many senses but which have not one sense
A man may see;

By the sounding and the fluent form of nonsense
We shower on thee;

By the shallow and the babbling things, our mothers,
From whom we spring;

By the barking and the braying things, our brothers Like whom we sing;

By all the fatuous things, our near relations,

That chaunt and cheer us;

By Leeds, and Liberal associations

Oh, Freedom, hear us !"

St. James's Gazette.

0:

PARODIES OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POLITICAL

POEMS.

Numerous parodies have been written of Mr. Swinburne's political poems, and of these some have already appeared in this collection.

Thus, in Volume III (p. 187), will be found Swinburne's The Commonweal, which had originally appeared in The Times of July 1, 1886, together with four parodies upon it. And, in Volume IV. (p. 147), Swinburne's The Question, from The Daily Telegraph, April 29, 1887, was given, together with the caustic Answer, which appeared in The Daily News of April 30, 1887.

The following parody is from Truth May 5, 1887:

MR. SWINBURNE'S "QUESTION "' ANSWERED.

COME, frenzied poet, first, then, pray
Just tell us what those verses meant
Which to the Telegraph you sent
Last Thursday; since we, sad to say,
Can't fathom their intent,

That you were very wild, 'twas clear,
With some one; for you were profuse
In that alliterative abuse,
And in those epithets severe

You aptly can produce.

But who it was you wished to curse, Or what it was had roused your ire,

[blocks in formation]

But, frantic poet, none the less,

When next your angry feelings egg
You into verse like Silas Wegg,
Do try your meaning to express
More clearly, let us beg.

'Tis vain, in fact, for you to use
Such very gory epithets,

And terms involved, and sounding threats, If all the time your shrieking Muse Sense utterly forgets.

And truly, if you thus again

Should in the Telegraph break out, Its readers, there is little doubt, When they have tried to find in vain Whom 'tis you fain would flout.

Will bid you to the fact recall

That empty sound and fury blind, And words ambitiously designed, Must needs be worthless, one and all, Unless with sense combined.

And you will be assailed with blame,

"The lips of all will laugh you dead," "And mockery shriek round your head," Whilst you live on to hear with shame Your reputation's fled !

-:0:

CLEAR THE WAY!

CLEAR the way, my lords and lackeys you have had your day.

Here you have your answer-England's yea against your

nay:

Long enough your House has held you: up, and clear the way!

Lust and falsehood, craft and traffic, precedent and gold, Tongue of courtier, kiss of harlot, promise bought and sold, Gave you heritage of empire over thralls of old.

Now that all these things are rotten, all their gold is rust, Quenched the pride they lived by, dead the faith and cold the lust,

Shall their heritage not also turn again to dust?

By the grace of these they reigned, who left their sons their sway :

By the grace of these, what England says her lords unsay:
Till at last her cry go forth against them-Clear the way!

By the grace of trust in treason knaves have lived and lied!
By the force of fear and folly fools have fed their pride:
By the strength of sloth and custom reason stands defied.
Lest perchance your reckoning on some latter day be worse,
Halt and hearken, lords of land and princes of the purse,
Ere the tide be full that comes with blessing and with curse.
Where we stand, as where you sit, scarce falls a sprinkling
spray;

But the wind that swells, the wave that follows, none shall stay:

Spread no more of sail for shipwreck: out, and clear the way!

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

The Pall Mall Gazette. August 19, 1884.

RAIL AWAY!

(Written by an aspiring young poet of the Neo-Billingsgate School in humble imitation of the "Clear the Way! contributed by Mr. Swinburne to a recent number of the Pall Mall Gazette.)

RAIL away, my budding bardlets! This hysteric day Shrieking lives so shrieking answers,-Journals say not

nay;

Long enough has reason held you : up and rail away!

Slang and slate, revile and bludgeon with assurance bold!
Tongue of gentle, style of scholar, now are far too cold
Go it like an angry fishwife when upon the scold.

Now that chivalry's forgotten, knightly steel all rust Quenched the pride old poets lived by, dead their grace as dust,

Shall their mild example bind us? Not a whit, I trust!

Blow the grace of Gentle Spenser, courtesy's soft sway! Hang the grace of Wordsworth, leaving nothing to unsay! Let the Poet's shriek go forth falsetto-Rail away!

By the grace of trust in reason dolts have lived and died
By the fear of noisy folly tongues have oft been tied,
By the strength of rabid ranting reason's now defied.

Lest perchance your reckoning, with good manners mar your verse

Halt and hearken lords of language, who would plump

your purse

Be not tied by taste's restrictions; learn to howl and curse!

Where we stand of slang to come, scarce falls a sprinkling

spray

But the wave of Billingsgate that's coming who shall stay? Spread your sails my budding bardlets,—up and rail away! Punch, August 30, 1884.

It was formerly a frequent theme of Mr. Swinburne's political verse, this violent abuse of the House of Lords :"They are worthy to reign o'er their brothers, To contemn them as clods and as carles, Who are Graces by grace of such mothers

As brightened the bed of King Charles."

Have the dukes of Buccleugh, Grafton, Richmond, and St. Albans forgotten and forgiven this humorous and playful allusion to their ancestresses, Lucy Waters, Lady Castlemaine, Louise de Querouaille, and Nell Gwynne, to whom they owe their dignities and estates?

A WORD FOR THE POET. (The Rebuke Parodic.)

[Mr. Swinburne's latest effusion, which has been eagerly quoted by Conservative journals, appears in "Sea Song and River Rhyme," and is entitled "A Word for the Navy."] THE lords of thy fate and thy keepers, O Swinburne, should padlock thy lips; It leaves us for genius weepers To hear thy Macdermottish tips.

Such crowing and blowing,
Such blatant British "side,"
Will scatter and shatter

Full soon thy poet's pride.

« AnteriorContinuar »