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.