The Heptalogia | Page 9

you see you can always be sure of my hand as the mother that bore me By the fact that I never write verse which has never been written
before me.?Other poets--I blush for them, Bill--may adore and repudiate in turn a Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna. Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is
built on--?"Of man's _first_ disobedience"--I've heard it attributed, dammy, to
Milton.?Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I may say,
to break spears?With the hirelings, forsooth, of the press who assert that Othello was
Shakespeare's.?When he that can run, sir, may read--if he borrows the book, or goes
on tick--?In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic. There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray wrote the whole
of The Bard--?Or that I didn't write half the Elegy, Bill, in a Country Churchyard. When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins--"Ruin seize thee!" and ends With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes on his friends. And I'll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives under the turf,
you?Will perceive it winds up with some lines on myself--and begins with
the curfew.?Now you'll grant it's more probable, Bill--as a man of the world, if
you please--?That all these should have prigged from myself than that I should have
prigged from all these.?I could cry when I think of it, friend, if such tears would comport
with my dignity,?That the author of Christabel ever should smart from such vulgar malignity. (You remember perhaps that was one of the first little things that I
carolled?After finishing Marmion, the Princess, the Song of the Shirt, and
Childe Harold.)?Oh, doubtless it always has been so--Ah, doubtless it always will be-- There are men who would say that myself is a different person from me. Better the porridge of patience a poor man snuffs in his plate Than the water of poisonous laurels distilled by the fingers of hate.
'Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted kind of a midnight, I know; You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar A. Poe? It was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter of old Lord St. Giles, Who inspired those delectable strains, and rewarded her bard with her
smiles.?There are tasters who've sipped of Castalia, who don't look on _my_
brew as _the_ brew:?There are fools who can't think why the names of my heroines of title
should always be Hebrew.?'Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said, "Noo, dinna ye fash wi'
Apollo, mon;?Gang to Jewry for wives and for concubines, lad--look at David and
Solomon.?And it gives an erotico-scriptural twang," said that high-born young
man, "--tickles?The lug" (he meant ear) "of the reader--to throw in a touch of the
Canticles."?So I versified half of The Preacher--it took me a week, working slowly.
Bah!?You don't half know the sex, Bill--they like it. And what if her name
was Aholibah??I recited her charms, in conjunction with those of a girl at the _café_, In a poem I published in collaboration with Templeton (Taffy). There are prudes in a world full of envy--and some of them thought it
too strong?To compare an earl's daughter by name with a girl at a French _restaurant_. I regarded her, though, with the chivalrous eyes of a knight-errant on
quest;?I may say I don't know that I ever felt prouder, old friend, of a conquest. And when _I_'ve been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing who
knew it; I?Thank my stars I'm as free from mock-modesty, friend, as from vulgar
fatuity.?I can't say if my spirit retains--for the subject appears to me misty--any
tie?To such associations as Poesy weaves round the records of Christianity. There are bards--I may be one myself--who delight in their skill to unlock
a lip's?Rosy secrets by kisses and whispers of texts from the charming Apocalypse. It was thus that I won, by such biblical pills of poetical manna, From two elders--Sir Seth and Lord Isaac--the liking of Lady Susanna. But I left her--a woman to me is no more than a match, sir, at tennis is-- When I heard she'd gone off with my valet, and burnt my rhymed version
of Genesis.?You may see by my shortness of speech that my time's almost up: I perceive That my new-fangled brevity strikes you: but don't--though the public
will--grieve.?As it's sometimes my whim to be vulgar, it's sometimes my whim to be brief; As when once I observed, after Heine, that "she was a harlot, and I" (which
is true) "was a thief."?(Though you hardly should cite this particular line, by the way, as an
instance of absolute brevity:?I'm aware, man, of that; so you needn't disgrace yourself, sir, by such
grossly mistimed and impertinent levity.)?I don't like to break off, any more than you wish me to stop: but my
fate is?Not to vent half a million such rhymes without blockheads exclaiming--
JAM