(A Ballade.)
You should study the bards of to-day
Who in England are now all the rage;
You should try to be piquant and gay:
Your lines are too solemn and sage.
You should try to fill only a page,
Or two at the most with your lay;
And revive the quaint verse of an age
That is fading forgotten away.
Study Lang, Gosse, and Dobson, I pray—
That their rhymes and their fancies engage
Your thought to be witty as they.
You must stand on the popular stage.
In the bars of an old fashioned cage
We must prison the birds of our May,
To carol the notes of an age
That is fading forgotten away.
Now this is a 'Ballade'-I say,
So one stanza more to our page,
But the "Vers de Société,"
If you can are the best for your 'wage.'
Though the purists may fall in a rage
That two rhymes go thrice in one lay,
You may passably echo an age
That is fading forgotten away.
Envoy.
Bard—heed not the seer and the sage,
'Afflatus' and Nature don't pay;
But stick to the forms of an age
That is fading forgotten away.
C. P. Cranch.
A BALLAD OF OLD METRES.
When, in the merry realm of France,
Bluff Francis ruled and loved and laughed,
Now held the lists with knightly lance,
Anon the knightly beaker quaffed;
Where wit could wing his keenest shaft
With Villon's verse or Montaigne's prose,
Then poets exercised their craft
In ballades, triolets, rondeaux.