Selected Poems (14 page)

But not in flimsy Darwin’s pompous chime,

That mighty master of unmeaning rhyme,

895

Whose gilded cymbals, more adorn’d than clear,

The eye delighted but fatigued the ear;

In show the simple lyre could once surpass,

But now, worn down, appear in native brass;

While all his train of hovering sylphs around

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Evaporate in similes and sound:

Him let them shun, with him let tinsel die:

False glare attracts, but more offends the eye.
²

Yet let them not to vulgar Wordsworth stoop,

The meanest object of the lowly group,

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Whose verse, of all but childish prattle void,

Seems blessed harmony to Lamb and Lloyd:
³

Let them – but hold, my muse, nor dare to teach

A strain far, far beyond thy humble reach:

The native genius with their being given

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Will point the path, and peal their notes to heaven.

And thou, too, Scott!
¹
resign to minstrels rude

The wilder slogan of a border feud:

Let others spin their meagre lines for hire;

Enough for genius if itself inspire!

915

Let Southey sing, although his teeming muse,

Prolific ever srin be too rofuse

Let simple Wordsworth
²
chime his childish verse,

And brother Coleridge lull the babe at nurse;

Let spectre-mongering Lewis aim, at most,

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To rouse the galleries, or to raise a ghost;

Let Moore still sigh; let Strangford steal from Moore,

And swear that Camoëns sang such notes of yore;

Let Hayley hobble on, Montgomery rave,

And godly Grahame chant a stupid stave;

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Let sonneteering Bowles his strains refine,

And whine and whimper to the fourteenth line;

Let Stott, Carlisle,
³
Matilda, and the rest

Of Grub-street, and of Grosvenor-place the best

Scrawl on, ’till death release us from the strain,

930

Or Common Sense assert her rights again.

But thou, with powers that mock the aid of praise,

Shouldst leave to humbler bards ignoble lays:

Thy country’s voice, the voice of all the nine,

Demand a hallow’d harp – that harp is thine.

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Say! will not Caledonia’s annals yield

The glorious record of some nobler field

Than the vile foray of a plundering clan,

Whose proudest deeds disgrace the name of man?

Or Marmion’s acts of darkness, fitter food

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For Sherwood’s outlaw tales of Robin Hood?

Scotland! still proudly claim thy native bard,

And be thy praise his first, his best reward!

Yet not with thee alone his name should live,

But own the vast renown a world can give;

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Be known, perchance, when Albion is no more,

And tell the tale of what she was before;

To future times her faded fame recall,

And save her glory, though his country fall.

Yet what avails the sanguine poet’s hope,

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To conquer ages, and with time to cope?

New eras spread their wings, new nations rise,

And other victors fill the applauding skies;

A few brief generations fleet along,

Whose sons forget the poet and his song:

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E’en now, what once-loved minstrels scarce may claim

The transient mention of a dubious name!

When fame’s loud trump hath blown its noblest blast,

Though long the sound, the echo sleeps at last;

And glory, like the phœnix
¹
‘midst her fires,

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Exhales her odours, blazes, and expires.

Shall hoary Granta call her sable sons,

Expert in science, more expert at puns?

Shall these approach the muse? ah, no! she flies,

Even from the tempting ore of Seaton’s prize;

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Though printers condescend the press to soil

With rhyme by Hoare, and epic blank by Hoyle:

Not him whose page, if still upheld by whist,

Requires no sacred theme to bid us list.
²

Ye! who in Granta’s honours would surpass,

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Must mount her Pegasus, a full-grown ass;

A foal well worthy of her ancient dam,

Whose Helicon is duller than her Cam.

There Clarke, still striving piteously ‘to please,’

Forgetting doggrel leads not to degrees,

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A would-be satirist, a hired buffoon,

A monthly scribbler of some low lampoon,
³

Condemn’d to drudge, the meanest of the mean,

And furbish falsehoods for a magazine,

Devotes to scandal his congenial mind;

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Himself a living libel on mankind.
⁴

Oh! dark asylum of a Vandal race!
¹

At once the boast of learning, and disgrace!

So lost to Phœbus, that nor Hodgson’s
²
verse

Can make thee better, nor poor Hewson’s
³
worse.

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But where fair Isis rolls her purer wave,

The partial muse delighted loves to lave;

On her green banks a greener wreath she wove,

To crown the bards that haunt her classic grove;

Where Richards wakes a genuine poet’s fires,

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And modern Britons glory in their sires.
⁴

For me, who, thus unask’d, have dared to tell

My country, what her sons should know too well,

Zeal for her honour bade me here engage

The host of idiots that infest her age;

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No just applause her honour’d name shall lose,

As first in freedom, dearest to the muse.

Oh! would thy bards but emulate thy fame,

And rise more worthy, Albion, of thy name!

What Athens was in science, Rome in power,

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What Tyre appear’d in her meridian hour,

‘Tis thine at once, fair Albion! to have been –

Earth’s chief dictatress, ocean’s lovely queen:

But Rome decay’d, and Athens strew’d the plain,

And Tyre’s proud piers lie shatter’d in the main;

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Like these, thy strength may sink, in ruin hurl’d,

And Britain fall, the bulwark of the world.

But let me cease, and dread Cassandra’s fate,

With warning ever scoff’d at, till too late;

To themes less lofty still my lay confine,

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And urge thy bards to gain a name like thine.

Then, hapless Britain! be thy rulers blest,

The senate’s oracles, the people’s jest!

Still hear thy motley orators dispense

The flowers of rhetoric, though not of sense,

1015

While Canning’s colleagues hate him for his wit,

And old dame Portland
¹
fills the place of Pitt.

Yet once again, adieu! ere this the sail

That wafts me hence is shivering in the gale;

And Afric’s coast and Calpe’s adverse height,

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And Stamboul’s minarets must greet my sight:

Thence shall I stray through beauty’s native clime,
²

Where Kaff
³
is clad in rocks, and crown’d with snows sublime.

But should I back return, no tempting press
⁴

Shall drag my journal from the desk’s recess:

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Let coxcombs, printing as they come from far,

Snatch his own wreath of ridicule from Carr;

Let Aberdeen and Elgin
¹
still pursue

The shade of fame through regions of virtù;

Waste useless thousands on their Phidian freaks,

1030

Misshapen monuments and maim’d antiques;

And make their grand saloons a general mart

For all the mutilated blocks of art:

Of Dardan tours let dilettanti tell,

I leave topography to rapid
²
Gell;
³

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And, quite content, no more shall interpose

To stun the public ear – at least with prose.

Thus far I’ve held my undisturb’d career,

Prepared for rancour, steel’d ’gainst selfish fear: