A NOTE TO NATURE,
accounting for my previous silence in an unusually temperate March and also presenting an ultimatum.
Ye great brown hares, grown madder through the Spring!
Ye birds that utilise your tiny throttles
To make the archways of the forest ring
Or go about your easy house-hunting!
Ye toads! ye axolotls!
Ye happy blighters all, that squeal and squat
And fly and browse where'er the mood entices,
Noting in every hedge or woodland grot
The swelling surge of sap, but noting not
The rise in current prices!
But chiefly you, ye birds, whose jocund note
(Linnets and larks and jays and red-billed ousels)
Oft in those happier springtides now remote
Caused me to catch the lyre and clear my throat
After some coy refusals!
Ay, and would cause me now—I have such bliss
Seeing the star-set vale, the pearls, the agates
Sown on the wintry boughs by Flora's kiss—
Only the trouble in my case is this,
I do not feed on maggots.
Could I but share your diet cheap and rude,
Your simple ways in trees and copses lurking;
But no, I need a pipe and lots of food,
A comfortable chair on which to brood—
Silence! the bard is working.
Could I but know that freedom from all care
That comes, I say, from gratis sets of suitings
And homes that need not premium nor repair
Except with sticks and mud and moss and hair,
My! there would be some flutings.
So and so only would the ivory rod
Stir the wild strings once more to exaltation;
So and so only the impetuous god
Pound in my bosom and produce that odd
Tum-tiddly-um sensation.
And often as I heard the throstles vamp,
Pouring their liquid notes like golden syrup,
Out would I go and round the garden tramp,
Wearing goloshes if the day were damp,
And imitate their chirrup.
Or, bowling peacefully upon my bike,
Well breakfasted, by no distractions flustered,
Pause near a leafy copse or brambled dyke,
And answer song for song the black-backed shrike,
The curlew and the bustard.
But now—ah, why prolong the dreadful strain?—
Limply my hand the unstrung harp relaxes;
The dear old days will not come back again
Whatever Mr. Austen Chamberlain
Does with the nation's taxes.
Lambs, buds, leap up; the lark to heaven climbs;
Bread does the same; the price of baccy's brutal;
And save (I do not note it in The Times)
They make exemptions for evolving rhymes,
Dashed if I mean to tootle!
Evoe.
Sportsman (just emerged from the brook). "Four in, did you say? Dash it all—just my luck. Got my glasses all mud and can't see ther fun."