TO MY CRITICS.
IMITATED FROM DE MUSSET.
My verse contains some images, ’tis true,
On Byron’s pages found, what then, he too
On other pages found them long before,
(Byron, I think, would hardly grudge them me,
Seeing I need them so much worse than he).
Read carefully the old Italian lore,
If you, to draw it very mild, would see
How freely Byron borrowed; he or she
As stupid as a school teacher must be
Who thinks in eighteen hundred eighty-four
To find a thought or rhyme not used before.
And yet I must not speak of “waters blue,”
Of “sunny skies,” and “eyes of heavenly hue,”
Nor use some old stock metaphor at need
Because, forsooth, pedantic fools may read,
The same in every language,—Sanscrit, Greek,
Hebrew and Latin, Dutch and Arabic.
Great bards of yore, and they of yesterday,
Before whose sun my rushlight pales away,
To whose deep flood, my song is but a rill,—
All, great and small, hear the same chorus still.
Read the old rotting magazines and see
The very venom that they void on me;
The arsenal where roving malice meets
The rusty darts that stung the heart of Keats.
Vile innuendo, and malignant sneer,
Blanche, Tray, and Sweetheart, hardly changed are here.
The lowest place amid the minstrel throng
Is all I claim; in the full tide of song
My voice is lost; upon my page appears
No burning message from supernal spheres.
But Teian glow and Lesbian passion still
A thousand lyres in every land they thrill.
A chord once found belongs, the whole world through,
To every minstrel that can strike it true.
My verses rhyme (at least some of them do),
And sweet as ever in our ear there chimes
The melody of old recurrent rhymes.
Dove ever mates with love, and bliss with kiss,
In every song from Sappho’s day to this.