RIZPAH, 1883.
(Written expressly for this collection).
RAILING, railing, railing, the crowd from town and lea,
When William's voice was heard, "O poet a peer to be!"
"Why should he call me, I wonder, in that high-born house to go,
For my politics won't bear searching, and my creed's rather mixed, you know?
"We should be laughed at, my William, 'twould be the jest of the town;
Even the knights would jeer, and the press sure to cry it down.
Why, I can but rule my own land; when I tried awhile for the stage,
I only drew empty houses, in this cynical latter age.
"Anything failed again? Nay, what is there left to fail?—
'Harold,' or 'Mary,' or 'May,' or even the 'Lover's Tale?'
What am I saying, and why? fails!—that must be a lie!
Fails—what fails?—not my faith in play writing, not I.
"Why will you call up here?—who are you?—what have you heard
That you all sit so solemn and quiet?—nobody's spoken a word.
O, to make of me—yes, his lordship! none of the scribbling crew
Have crept in by their rhymes before, as I have dared to do.
"Ah! you that have lived so soft, what do you know of the spite,
The cutting and slashing critiques that the wretched papers write?
I have known it; when you were amused in the stalls the first night of a play,
And chattered and gossipped together, and forgot it the very next day.
"Nay, but it's kind of you, William, to gild my declining life,
And make me a peer, a baron, above all this petty strife;
But I haven't left off scribbling, and shall not—no, not I;
But I'll write whenever I will, for the public's sure to buy.
"I whipt Miss Bulwer for jeering, and gave it him, slightly riled,
For mocking at me, or my poems, has always driven me wild.
To be idle—I couldn't be idle—I do not write for a whim,
And a guinea a line is better than a short "Italian Hymn."
"So, William, I thank you gladly; I think you meant to be kind;
And I will not heed the mob, whilst they'll very quickly find
The poems will read as well by a Lord as ever they did before,
And the publishers sell more copies, and more, and more, and more.
See how it reads for yourself, to be stuck up on every wall,
Lord Tennyson's Poems complete, in a specially printed Vol."
W.
The Nineteenth Century for November, 1881, contained a very uncomfortable kind of poem, by Tennyson, entitled "DESPAIR, a Dramatic Monologue." The argument of the poem was that "a man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolve to end themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man is rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned."
The Fortnightly Review of the following month contained a parody which not only turned inside out the arguments of the original poem, but was so exquisitely worded as a burlesque that it was by many attributed to the pen of no less a poet than Mr. A. C. Swinburne.