III.
Sets forth, despite the Law’s dull interference,
A lady’s birth, age, family, and appearance.
Arms have I sung full oft, both steel and white ones;
Guns have I sung till I can sing no more;
Men have I sung, both common and polite ones:
Yet never sang one heroine before.
Come, then, my ghost-girls, dark, fair, plump, and slight ones,
Come in the finest, flimsiest frocks ye wore....
Alas, not one of you quite fills the bill—
A life-size model for my Lady Jill.
Pardon, then, Magda, Gladys, Nancy, Florence,
Doris, Patricia, Mollie, Celandine,
Nor hold your erstwhile suitor in abhorrence
Because, from one, he takes eyes subtly green;
From other, hands a Sargent or a Lawrence
Had envied for his canvas; here, the sheen
Of gold hair, auburn-shot, in whose abundance,
What time Jill dreamed, young Cupids watched the sun dance;
There a smooth throat, an arched, attractive ankle,
Soft cheek, curved back in bloom to close-set ear,
Red mouth full-lipped, a voice whose love-tones rankle
Still in this heart of mine,—a voice so dear
That ... But no more! In fear this rhyming prank’ll
Offend some damozel whom I revere,
I state: Jill’s just an ordinary blonde,
Fair, frail, flirtatious, rather fast than fond.
You know the type—aristo-plutocratic,
Out of blue blood by hard North Country cash;
A self-assertive sire; a dam, lymphatic
(Since rarely strawberry leaves and sovereigns clash);
Their sole son, daring in the diplomatic
(Thumping his Underwood while kingdoms crash);
Their daughter ... Is there a man alive can swear
Exactly what she did or did not dare?
For Jill was one of those astounding females,
Born in a chaster, pre-Edwardian day;
When lone Lucindas dared not dine nor tea males
For dread lest scandal dub them “coryphée”;
When none drank deep of D’Abernonian dream-ales,
But quietly our Empire went its way,
Nor realised that subalterns on horses
Monopolized the brain-power of its Forces:
One who was yet a span from flapperhood,
Still puzzling o’er the simplest of equations;
What time in robe of saffron Phoebus stood,
And all our Lanes were gay with green carnations,
And private hansoms sought the Johnian Wood,
And the shrill cycle-bell’s first tintillations
Resounded from the dawning to the dark
In a Rolls-Royceless, Peter Panless Park:
One who attained the pig-tail’s ribboned dowry,
And helped to pass a Kipling tambourine,
When first from lands of wattle, maple, Maori,
Men came at summons of a dying Queen:
One who, at Auteuil, Dresden, and Rathgowrie,
Acquired that polish reft of which, I ween,
It is not possible for our Dianas
To emulate a modern grande dame’s manners:
One on whose head the ostrich-feathers nodded
In Alexandrine courts—and chez Bassano;
In whose young ears, song’s angels disembodied.
Rang the last notes of Melbourne’s own soprano;
Whose lithe feet, Moykoff-shod, the grouse-moors plodded,
Or danced the new Machiché Brasiliano,
In times before, unchaperoned of skinny ma,
Suburbia’s daughters sought the darkling kinema:
To put the matter briefly—One of Them.
Bear witness, Muses Nine, how most unworthy
Is my gold nib to touch their garment’s hem.
Say, Byron (for as bard I still prefer thee
To all whose pallid minor stars be-gem
These Gotha nights) would not such task deter thee
From the rhymed octave—sometime known as Whistlecraft—
In which, poor ass, I ply this weekly thistlecraft?
Οίμοι! that I can never be a poet
Modelled on spoon-fed college Adonäises,
Whose metres reek of Porson, Jebb, and Jowett,
Whose very thoughts derive from donnish däises.
Alas! for us who, writing life, must know it—
Its sights, its scents, its ladies, lords, and Läises.
Alas! for my refusal to disseminate—
Even in verse—the scholarly-effeminate.
And oh! ten thousand times alas, should Jill
Be recognised in these Parnassian pages.
Woe for the libel action, and the bill
Which he must face who in the law engages.
And ah! thank Heaven for a metric skill
That shields this head from Justice Darling’s rages ...
Safeguarded by thy last experience, G. Moore,
I maiden-name my lady—Lewis-Seymour.