Page 74 - Poetry-Books

Exit Poetry

Alack, poor Phoebus, shut up shop,
And send the Muses packing!
Our old-time ways of turning lays
In rules were sadly lacking.
Instead of “light that never was
On sea or land” beholden,
They turn on verse electric light;
And scout our methods olden.

The veriest freshman of the schools
Now threatens to surpass us:
They’ve got an Inclined Plane to lift
The rhymer up Parnassus.
They’ve turned your Fount of Castaly
To steam to furnish “power,”
And handbooks of Poetics make
A poet in an hour!

The simple song, from simpler heart,
To law once bade defiance,
But verse no more can be an art—
They’ve changed it to a science.
Since half the bards are pedants grown,
And half are college fellows,
The minstrel’s occupation’s gone
As surely as Othello’s!

Said Phoebus: “Bards began to sing
Ere handbooks of Poetics
Set all the world to tinkering
A sort of rhymed athletics.
What boots it that from dawn to dark
You spend the hours rehearsing
This ground-and-lofty tumbling, or
The Del Sarte drill in versing?

“Until some spark of fire divine
Has set the heart aglow, it
Is not the rules of all the schools

~ 72 ~