AFTER A. C. SWINBURNE GILLIAN

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Carolyn Wells

THE MANLET

IN stature the Manlet was dwarfish—
No burly big Blunderbore he:
And he wearily gazed on the crawfish
His Wifelet had dressed for his tea.
"Now reach me, sweet Atom, my gunlet,
And hurl the old shoelet for luck;
Let me hie to the bank of the runlet
And shoot thee a Duck!"
She has reached him his minnikin gunlet:
She has hurled the old shoelet for luck;
She is busily baking a bunlet,
To welcome him home with his duck.
On he speeds, never wasting a wordlet,
Though thoughtlets cling closely as wax,
To the spot where the beautiful birdlet
So quietly quacks.
Where the Lobsterlet lurks and the Crablet
So slowly and creepily crawls:
Where the Dolphin's at home and the Dablet
Pays long ceremonious calls:
Where the Grublet is sought by the Froglet:
Where the Frog is pursued by the Duck:
Where the Ducklet is chased by the Doglet—
So runs the world's luck.
He has loaded with bullet and powder:
His footfall is noiseless as air:
But the Voices grow louder and louder
And bellow and bluster and blare.
They bristle before him and after,
They flutter above and below,
Shrill shriekings of lubberly laughter,
Weird wailings of woe!
They echo without him, within him:
They thrill through his whiskers and beard:
Like a teetotum seeming to spin him,
With sneers never hitherto sneered.
"Avengement," they cry, "on our Foelet!
Let the Manikin weep for our wrongs!
Let us drench him from toplet to toelet
With nursery songs!
"He shall muse upon Hey! Diddle! Diddle!
On the Cow that surmounted the Moon!
He shall rave of the Cat and the Fiddle,
And the Dish that eloped with the Spoon:
And his soul shall be sad for the Spider,
When Miss Muffett was sipping her whey,
That so tenderly sat down beside her,
And scared her away!
"The music of Midsummer-madness
Shall sting him with many a bite,
Till, in rapture of rollicking sadness,
He shall groan with a gloomy delight;
He shall swathe him like mists of the morning,
In platitudes luscious and limp,
Such as deck, with a deathless adorning,
The Song of the Shrimp!
"When the Ducklet's dark doom is decided,
We will trundle him home in a trice:
And the banquet so plainly provided
Shall round into rosebuds and rice:
In a blaze of pragmatic invention
He shall wrestle with Fate and shall reign:
But he has not a friend fit to mention,
So hit him again!"
He has shot it, the delicate darling!
And the Voices have ceased from their strife:
Not a whisper of sneering or snarling,
As he carries it home to his wife:
Then, cheerily champing the bunlet
His spouse was so skilful to bake,
He hies him once more to the runlet,
To fetch her the Drake!
Lewis Carroll.

IF!

IF life were never bitter,
And love were always sweet,
Then who would care to borrow
A moral from to-morrow—
If Thames would always glitter,
And joy would ne'er retreat,
If life were never bitter,
And love were always sweet!
If care were not the waiter
Behind a fellow's chair,
When easy-going sinners
Sit down to Richmond dinners,
And life's swift stream flows straighter,
By Jove, it would be rare,
If care were not the waiter
Behind a fellow's chair.
If wit were always radiant,
And wine were always iced,
And bores were kicked out straightway
Through a convenient gateway;
Then down the year's long gradient
'Twere sad to be enticed,
If wit were always radiant,
And wine were always iced.
Mortimer Collins.

THE MAID OF THE MEERSCHAUM

NUDE nymph, when from Neuberg's I led her
In velvet enshrined and encased,
When with rarest Virginia I fed her,
And pampered each maidenly taste
On "Old Judge" and "Lone Jack" and brown "Bird's-eye,"
The best that a mortal might get—
Did she know how, from whiteness of curds, I
Should turn her to jet?
She was blonde and impassive and stately
When first our acquaintance began,
When she smiled from the pipe-bowl sedately
On the "Stunt" who was scarcely a man.
But labuntur anni fugaces,
And changed in due season were we,
For she wears the blackest of faces,
And I'm a D. C.
Unfailing the comfort she gave me
In the days when I owned to a heart,
When the charmers that used to enslave me
For Home or the Hills would depart.
She was Polly or Agnes or Kitty
(Whoever pro tem. was my flame),
And I found her most ready to pity,
And—always the same.
At dawn, when the pig broke from cover,
At noon, when the pleaders were met,
She clung to the lips of her lover
As never live maiden did yet;
At the Bund, when I waited the far light
That brought me my Mails o'er the main—
At night, when the tents, in the starlight,
Showed white on the plain.
And now, though each finely cut feature
Is flattened and polished away,
I hold her the loveliest creature
That ever was fashioned from clay.
Let an epitaph thus, then, be wrought for
Her tomb, when the smash shall arrive:
"Hic jacet the life's love I bought for
Rupees twenty-five."
Rudyard Kipling.

QUAERITUR

DAWN that disheartens the desolate dunes,
Dulness of day as it bursts on the beach,
Sea-wind that shrillest the thinnest of tunes,
What is the wisdom thy wailings would teach?
Far, far away, down the foam-frescoed reach,
Where ravening rocks cleave the crest of the seas,
Sigheth the sound of thy sonorous speech,
As gray gull and guillemot gather their fees;
Taking toll of the beasts that are bred in the seas.
Foam-flakes fly farther than faint eyes can follow—
Drop down the desolate dunes and are done;
Fleeter than foam-flowers flitteth the Swallow,
Sheer for the sweets of the South and the Sun.
What is thy tale? O thou treacherous Swallow!
Sing me thy secret, Beloved of the Skies,
That I may gather my garments and follow—
Flee on the path of thy pinions and rise
Where strong storms cease and the weary wind dies.
Lo! I am bound with the chains of my sorrow;
Swallow, swift Swallow, ah, wait for a while!
Stay but a moment—it may be to-morrow
Chains shall be severed and sad souls shall smile!
Only a moment—a mere minute's measure—
How shall it hurt such a swift one as thou?
Pitiless Swallow, full flushed for thy pleasure,
Canst thou not even one instant allow
To weak-winged wanderers? Wait for me now.
Rudyard Kipling.

A MELTON MOWBRAY PORK-PIE

STRANGE pie that is almost a passion,
O passion immoral for pie!
Unknown are the ways that they fashion,
Unknown and unseen of the eye.
The pie that is marbled and mottled,
The pie that digests with a sigh:
For all is not Bass that is bottled,
And all is not pork that is pie.
Richard Le Gallienne.

FOAM AND FANGS

O NYMPH with the nicest of noses;
And finest and fairest of forms;
Lips ruddy and ripe as the roses
That sway and that surge in the storms;
O buoyant and blooming Bacchante,
Of fairer than feminine face,
Rush, raging as demon of Dante—
To this, my embrace!
The foam and the fangs and the flowers,
The raving and ravenous rage
Of a poet as pinion'd in powers
As condor confined in a cage!
My heart in a haystack I've hidden,
As loving and longing I lie,
Kiss open thine eyelids unbidden—
I gaze and I die!
I've wander'd the wild waste of slaughter,
I've sniffed up the sepulchre's scent,
I've doated on devilry's daughter,
And murmur'd much more than I meant;
I've paused at Penelope's portal,
So strange are the sights that I've seen,
And mighty's the mind of the mortal
Who knows what I mean.
Walter Parke.

A SONG OF RENUNCIATION

IN the days of my season of salad,
When the down was as dew on my cheek,
And for French I was bred on the ballad,
For Greek on the writers of Greek,—
Then I sang of the rose that is ruddy,
Of "pleasure that winces and stings,"
Of white women, and wine that is bloody,
And similar things.
Of Delight that is dear as Desi-er,
And Desire that is dear as Delight;
Of the fangs of the flame that is fi-er,
Of the bruises of kisses that bite;
Of embraces that clasp and that sever,
Of blushes that flutter and flee
Round the limbs of Dolores, whoever
Dolores may be.
I sang of false faith that is fleeting
As froth of the swallowing seas,
Time's curse that is fatal as Keating
Is fatal to amorous fleas;
Of the wanness of woe that is whelp of
The lust that is blind as a bat—
By the help of my Muse and the help of
The relative That.
Panatheist, bruiser and breaker
Of kings and the creatures of kings,
I shouted on Freedom to shake her
Feet loose of the fetter that clings;
Far rolling my ravenous red eye,
And lifting a mutinous lid,
To all monarchs and matrons I said I
Would shock them—and did.
Thee I sang, and thy loves, O Thalassian,
O "noble and nude and antique!"
Unashamed in the "fearless old fashion,"
Ere washing was done by the week;
When the "roses and rapture" that girt you
Were visions of delicate vice,
And the "lilies and languors of virtue"
Not nearly so nice.
O delights of the time of my teething,
Felise, Fragoletta, Yolande!
Foam-yeast of a youth in its seething
On blasted and blithering sand!
Snake-crowned on your tresses and belted
With blossoms that coil and decay,
Ye are gone; ye are lost; ye are melted
Like ices in May.
Hushed now is the bibulous bubble
Of "lithe and lascivious" throats;
Long stript and extinct is the stubble
Of hoary and harvested oats;
From the sweets that are sour as the sorrel's
The bees have abortively swarmed;
And Algernon's earlier morals
Are fairly reformed.
I have written a loyal Armada,
And posed in a Jubilee pose;
I have babbled of babies and played a
New tune on the turn of their toes;
Washed white from the stain of Astarte,
My books any virgin may buy;
And I hear I am praised by a party
Called Something Mackay!
When erased are the records, and rotten
The meshes of memory's net;
When the grace that forgives has forgotten
The things that are good to forget;
When the trill of my juvenile trumpet
Is dead and its echoes are dead;
Then the laurel shall lie on the crumpet
And crown of my head!
Owen Seaman.

NEPHELIDIA

FROM the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous moonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat?
Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation,
Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past;
Flushed with the famishing fulness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation,
Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast?
Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death;
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath.
Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses,—
"Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die."
Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be,
While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod;
Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm-breathing baby,
As they grope through the grave-yard of creeds, under skies growing green at a groan for the grimness of God.
Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer:
Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things;
Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn that is freed from the fangs that pursue her,
Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.
Algernon Charles Swinburne.

THE LAY OF MACARONI

AS a wave that steals when the winds are stormy
From creek to cove of the curving shore,
Buffeted, blown, and broken before me,
Scattered and spread to its sunlit core:
As a dove that dips in the dark of maples
To sip the sweetness of shelter and shade,
I kneel in thy nimbus, O noon of Naples,
I bathe in thy beauty, by thee embayed.
What is it ails me that I should sing of her?
The queen of the flashes and flames that were!
Yea, I have felt the shuddering sting of her,
The flower-sweet throat and the hands of her!
I have swayed and sung to the sound of her psalters,
I have danced her dances of dizzy delight,
I have hallowed mine hair to the horns of her altars,
Between the nightingale's song and the night!
What is it, Queen, that now I should do for thee?
What is it now I should ask at thine hands?
Blow of the trumpets thine children once blew for thee?
Break from thine feet and thine bosom the bands?
Nay, as sweet as the songs of Leone Leoni,
And gay as her garments of gem-sprinkled gold,
She gives me mellifluous, mild macaroni,
The choice of her children when cheeses are old!
And over me hover, as if by the wings of it,
Frayed in the furnace by flame that is fleet,
The curious coils and the strenuous strings of it,
Dropping, diminishing down, as I eat;
Lo! and the beautiful Queen, as she brings of it,
Lifts me the links of the limitless chain,
Bidding mine mouth chant the splendidest things of it,
Out of the wealth of my wonderful brain!
Behold! I have done it: my stomach is smitten
With sweets of the surfeit her hands have unrolled.
Italia, mine cheeks with thine kisses are bitten,
I am broken with beauty, stabbed, slaughtered, and sold!
No man of thy millions is more macaronied,
Save mighty Mazzini, than musical Me;
The souls of the Ages shall stand as astonied,
And faint in the flame I am fanning for thee!
Bayard Taylor.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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