Lauds and libels

VARIA

Charles L. Graves

BATH

(With grateful acknowledgments to the anonymous but urbane author of “Bath in History and Social Traditions.”)

Fair city, though King Bladud and his story

Is largely wrapt in mythologic mist

And legends of your fame in ages hoary

Are scouted by the sceptic annalist,

One century at least of crowded glory

Inspires a recent genial eulogist

And prompts a humble rhymer to rehearse

Your merits in a piece of jingling verse.

I pass the Romans, business-like invaders;

Of their enduring traces he that runs

May read elsewhere; I pass the Saxon raiders

And tales of mediÆval monks and nuns,

Of leper hospitals and mud-bath waders,

And hurry on to Beaux and Belles and Buns;

Your palmy days, me judice, began

In the Augustan period of Queen Anne.

The men who planned and built your noble Abbey

Well earned the homage of a sacred bard,

Yet in your golden roll it would be shabby

Your minor worthies wholly to discard;

And though your Bun, now sugarless and flabby

And highly-priced, is sadly shrunk and marred,

The first compounder of its rich delight

Ought not to pass into eternal night.

Of your great trio, Allen, Wood and Nash,

Allen, MÆcenas-postman, leaves me cold;

He had not one redeeming vice to clash

With his array of virtues manifold;

But he was patriotic, for his cash

Freed Wood’s majestic genius, sane yet bold,

Until a new and gracious city rose;

And Nash was far the finest of the Beaux.

At least this meed of praise must we accord him,

That he restrained the mutinies of Mode;

That Wesley was the only man who floored him;

That order was the essence of his code;

That bullies feared him, that the poor adored him,

And, though in age a thorny path be trode,

For many a year none could his seat disturb,

Mounted on Folly ridden on the curb.

What famous names, what episodes romantic

Are linked with yours in Clio’s sacred shrine

Ere piety pronounced you Corybantic

And seaside bathing compassed your decline!

“Sherry” and Siddons, Hannah the pedantic,

Fielding and Walpole, how your annals shine!—

Immortal Jane, and Herschel counting bars

And drilling fiddlers—and discovering stars.

Yet even when your vogue was slowly waning

Rich sunset splendours lingered on the scene,

When Sultan Beckford in your midst was reigning

And lending you an Oriental mien;

When D’Arblay, loyal to her haunts remaining,

Extolled your beauties varied and serene;

When in the Octagon men heard Magee

And Lansdown teams rejoiced in “W. G.”

Fashion may veer; the elegant and witty—

Light come, light go—may scatter far and wide,

But still the terraced colonnaded city

Stands proudly by the silver Avon’s tide,

And scenes that move to wonder, praise and pity,

Touched gently by the hand of Time, abide;

Still, O immortal Bath, you wear your crown

Fresh in your beauty, old in your renown.

IN WILD WALES

Dwarfing the town that to the hillside clings

On terraced slopes, the castle, nobly planned

And noble in its ruined greatness, flings

Its double challenge to the sea and land.

Oh, if the ancient spirit of the place

Could win free utterance in articulate tones,

What tales to hearten and inspire and brace

Would issue from these grey and lichened stones

Once manned and held by paladin and peer,

Now tenanted by jackdaws, bats and owls,

Save when the casual tourist through its drear

And grass-grown courts disconsolately prowls.

Once famous as the scene of Border fights,

Now watching, in the greatest war of all,

Old men, with their bilingual acolytes,

Beating, outside its gates, a little ball;

While on the crumbling battlements on high,

Where mail-clad men-at-arms kept watch and ward,

Adventurous sheep amaze the curious eye

Instead of grazing on the level sward.

Inland the amphitheatre of hills

Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest,

And murmurs of innumerable rills

Blend with the heaving of the ocean’s breast.

Already Autumn’s fiery finger laid

On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide

In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed

The tranquil beauties of the countryside.

Here every prospect pleases, and the spot,

Unspoilt, unvulgarized by man, remains,

Thanks largely to a System which has not

Accelerated or improved its trains.

Yet even here, amid untroubled ways,

Far from the city’s fevered, tainted breath,

Yon distant plume of yellow smoke betrays

The ceaseless labours of the mills of death.

THE LITTLE RIVER

Let mighty pens praise mighty rivers—

The Yang-tse-Kiang or Hoang-Ho,

In climes that desiccate the livers

Of foreigners who come and go.

Some may prefer the Mississippi,

Others the Nile, whose genial flood

Enriches the industrious “Gippy”

With gifts of fertilizing mud.

Bates found the Amazon amazing;

But, all unfit for lordly themes;

I choose the simpler task of praising

One of our humble Berkshire streams.

Here are no tropical surprises,

No cataracts roaring from the steep;

No hippo your canoe capsizes,

No rhinos on the bather creep.

Here, as along the banks you potter,

The fiercest creature is the gnat;

You may perhaps espy an otter,

You’re sure to see a water-rat.

The kingfisher, a living jewel,

On halcyon days darts in and out,

But never interrupts the duel

Between the angler and the trout.

Hard by the plovers wheel and clamour,

The gold is still upon the gorse,

And mystery and calm and glamour

Brood o’er the little river’s source,

Where, in a pool of blue-green lustre,

The water bubbles from the sand,

And pine-trees in a solemn cluster

Like sentinels around it stand.

And thence, through level champaign gliding,

Past cottages with russet tiles,

Past marsh and mead the stream goes sliding

For half-a-dozen tranquil miles,

Till, with its waters still untainted

And fringed with waving starwort stems,

With towns and factories unacquainted,

It merges in the silver Thames.

“Scorn not small things; their charm endears them,”

The ancient poet wisely sang;

Great rivers man admires but fears them;

We love our homely little Pang.

SIX VILE VERBS

When I see on a poster

A programme which “features”

Charlie Chaplin and other

Delectable creatures,

I feel just as if

Someone hit me a slam

Or a strenuous biff

On the mid diaphragm.

When I read in a story,

Though void of offences,

That somebody “glimpses”

Or somebody “senses,”

The chord that is struck

Fills my bosom with ire,

And I’m ready to chuck

The whole book in the fire.

When against any writer

It’s urged that he “stresses”

His points, or that something

His fancy “obsesses,”

In awarding his blame

Though the critic be right,

Yet I feel all the same

I could shoot him at sight.

But (worst of these horrors)

Whenever I read

That somebody “voices”

A national need,

As the Bulgars and Greeks

Are abhorred by the Serb,

So I feel toward the freaks

Who employ this vile verb.

SOME MORE BAD WORDS

In a recent verse adventure

I compiled “a little list”

Of the verbs deserving censure,

Verbs that “never would be missed”;

Now, to flatter the fastidious,

Suffer me the work to crown

With three epithets—all hideous—

And one noisome noun.

First, to add to the recital

Of the words that gall and irk,

Is the old offender “vital,”

Done to death by overwork;

Only a prolonged embargo

On its use by Press and pen

Can recall this kind of argot

Back to life again.

I, in days not very distant,

Though the memory gives me pain,

From the awful word “insistent”

Did not utterly refrain;

Once it promised to refresh us,

Seemed to be alert enough;

Now I loathe it, laboured, precious—

Merely verbal fluff.

Thirdly, in the sheets that daily

Cater for our vulgar needs,

There’s a word that figures gaily

In reviewers’ friendly screeds,

Who declare a book’s “arresting,”

Mostly, it must be confessed,

Meaning just the problem-questing

Which deserves arrest.

Last and vilest of this bad band

Is that noun of gruesome sound,

“Uplift,” which the clan of Chadband

Hold in reverence profound;

Used for a dynamic function

’Tis a word devoid of guile,

Only as connoting unction

It excites my bile.

TO A MODERN MUSE

O Metaphasia, peerless maid,

How can I fitly sing

The priceless decorative aid

To dialogue you bring,

Enabling serious folk, whose brains

Are commonplace and crude,

To soar to unimagined planes

Of sweet ineptitude.

Changed by your magic, common sense

Nonsensical appears,

And stars of sober influence

Shoot madly from their spheres.

You lure us from the beaten track,

From minding P.’s and Q.’s,

To paths where white is always black

And pies resemble pews.

Strange beasts, more strange than the giraffe,

You conjure up to view,

The flue-box and the forking-calf,

Unknown at any Zoo;

And new vocations you unfold,

Wonder on wonder heaping,

Hell-banging for the overbold,

And toffee-cavern keeping.

With you we hatch the pasty snipe,

And all undaunted face

Huge fish of unfamiliar type—

Bush-pike and bubble-dace;

Or, fired by hopes of lyric fame,

We deviate from prose,

And make it our especial aim

Bun-sonnets to compose.

I wonder did the ancients prove

Responsive to your spell,

Or, riveted to Reason’s groove,

Against your charms rebel.

And yet some senator obese,

In Rome long years ago,

May have misnamed a masterpiece

De Gallo bellico.

We know there were heroic men

Ere Agamemnon’s days,

Who passed forgotten from our ken,

Lacking a poet’s praise;

But, though great Metaphasiarchs

Have doubtless flourished sooner,

I’m sure their raciest remarks

Have been eclipsed by S*****r.

BALLADE OF FREE VERSE

Up to the end of the great Queen’s reign

Pegasus proved a tractable steed;

Verse was metrical, mostly sane;

“Fleshly” singers who wished to exceed

Seldom, however great was their need,

Held that prosody was a crime.

Critics were one and all agreed:

“Poets will never abandon rhyme.”

Now, inspired by a high disdain,

Grudging the past its rightful meed,

Georgian minstrels, might and main,

Urge that verse must be wholly freed

Now and for ever from rules that lead

Singers in chains to a jingling chime,

Slaves of the obscurantist screed:

“Poets will never abandon rhyme.”

Milton and Tennyson give them pain;

Marinetti’s the man they heed,

Grim apostle of stress and strain,

Noise, machinery, smell and speed.

Yet the best of the British breed,

Fighters who sing ’mid blood and grime,

Lend new force to the ancient rede:

“Poets will never abandon rhyme.”

Envoy

Prince, vers libre is a noxious weed;

Verse that is blank may be sublime;

Still, in spite of the Georgian creed,

Poets will never abandon rhyme.

THE STRIFE OF TONGUES

(Lines suggested by the recent demise of the inventor of Esperanto.)

As a patriotic Briton

I am naturally smitten

With disgust

When some universal lingo

By a zealous anti-Jingo

Is discussed.

Some there are who hold that Spanish

In the end is bound to banish

Other tongues;

Some again regard Slavonic

As a stimulating tonic

For the lungs.

I would sooner bank on Tuscan,

Ay, or even on Etruscan,

Than on Erse;

But fanatical campaigners,

Gaelic Leaguers and Sinn Feiners

Find it terse.

Some are moved to have a shy at

Persian, thanks to the RubÁiyÁt

And its ease;

But it’s quite another matter

If you’re anxious for to chatter

In Chinese.

To instruct a brainy brat in

Canine or colloquial Latin

May be wise;

But it’s not an education

As a fruitful speculation

I’d advise.

French? All elegance equips it,

But how oft on foreign lips it

Runs awry;

German, tainted, execrated,

Is for ages relegated

To the sty.

As for brand-new tongues invented

By professors discontented

With the old,

Well, the prospect of a “panto”

Played and sung in Esperanto

Leaves me cold.

“JONG”

(Lines suggested by an Australian aboriginal place-name commonly known by its last syllable.)

Fine names are found upon the map—

Kanturk and Chirk and Cong,

Grogtown and Giggleswick and Shap,

Chowbent and Chittagong;

But other places, less renowned,

In richer euphony abound

Than the familiar throng;

For instance, there is Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong.

In childhood’s days I took delight

In Lear’s immortal Dong,

Whose nose was luminously bright,

Who sang a silvery song.

He did not terrify the birds

With strange and unpropitious words

Of double-edged ontong;

I’m sure he hailed from Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong.

Prince Giglio’s bag, the fairy’s gift,

Helped him to right the wrong,

Encouraged diligence and thrift,

And “opened with a pong”;

But though its magic powers were great

It could not quite ejaculate

A word so proud and strong

And beautiful as Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong.

I crave no marble pleasure-dome,

No forks with golden prong;

Like Horace, in a frugal home

I’d gladly rub along,

Contented with the humblest cot

Or shack or hut, if it had got

A name like Billabong,

Or, better still, like Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong.

Sweet is the music of the spheres,

Majestic is Mong Blong,

And bland the beverage that cheers,

Called Sirupy Souchong;

But sweeter, more inspiring far

Than tea or peak or tuneful star

I deem it to belong

To such a place as Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

Clyx.com