  O my Publisher, how dreadfully you bore me! Of your censure I am frankly growing tired. With your diatribes eternally before me, How on earth can I expect to feel inspired? You are orderly, no doubt, and systematic, In that office where recumbent you recline; You would modify your methods in an attic Such as mine. If you lived a sort of hand-to-mouth existence (Where the mouth found less employment than the hand); If your rhymes would lend your humour no assistance, And your wit assumed a form that never scann'd; If you sat and waited vainly at your table While Calliope declined to give her cues, You would realise how very far from stable Was the Mews! You would find it quite impossible to labour With the patient perseverance of a drone, While some tactless but enthusiastic neighbour Played a cake walk on a wheezy gramophone, While your peace was so disturbed by constant clatter, That at length you grew accustomed—nay, resigned, To the never-ending victory of Matter Over Mind. While you batten upon plovers' eggs and claret, In the shelter of some fashionable club, I am starving, very likely, in a garret, Off the street so incorrectly labelled Grub, Where the vintage smacks distinctly of the ink-butt, And the atmosphere is redolent of toil, And there's nothing for the journalist to drink but Midnight oil! It is useless to solicit inspiration When one isn't in the true poetic mood, When one contemplates the prospect of starvation, And one's little ones are clamouring for food. When one's tongue remains ingloriously tacit, One is forced with some reluctance to admit That, alas! (as Virgil said) Poeta nascit- -Ur, non fit! Then, my Publisher, be gentle with your poet; Do not treat him with the harshness he deserves, For, in fact, altho' you little seem to know it, You are gradually getting on his nerves. Kindly dam the foaming torrent of your curses, While I ask you,—yes, and pause for a reply,— Are you writing this immortal book of verses, Or am I? |
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