“In the lonesome latter years,
(Fatal years!)
To the dropping of my tears
Danced the mad and mystic spheres
In a rounded, reeling rune,
’Neath the moon,
To the dripping and the dropping of my tears.

Ah, my soul is swathed in gloom,
(Ulalume!)
In a dim Titanic tomb,
For my gaunt and gloomy soul
Ponders o’er the penal scroll,
O’er the parchment (not a rhyme),
Out of place,—out of time,—
I am shredded, shorn, unshifty,
(Oh, the fifty!)
And the days have passed, the three,
Over me!
And the debit and the credit are as one to him and me!
’Twas the random runes I wrote
At the bottom of the note
(Wrote and freely
Gave to Greeley),
In the middle of the night,
In the mellow, moonless night,
When the stars were out of sight,
When my pulses like a knell,
(Israfel!)
Danced with dim and dying fays
O’er the ruins of my days,
O’er the dimeless, timeless days,
When the fifty, drawn at thirty,
Seeming thrifty, yet the dirty
Lucre of the market, was the most that I could raise!
Fiends controlled it,
(Let him hold it!)
Devils held for me the inkstand and the pen;
Now the days of grace are o’er,
(Ah, Lenore!)
I am but as other men:
What is time, time, time,
To my rare and runic rhyme,
To my random, reeling rhyme,
By the sands along the shore,
Where the tempest whispers, ‘Pay him!’ and I answer, ‘Nevermore!’”[3]

Bret Harte also has given a good imitation of Poe’s style in “The Willows,” from which there follows an extract:

“But Mary, uplifting her finger,
Said, ‘Sadly this bar I mistrust,—
I fear that this bar does not trust.
Oh, hasten—oh, let us not linger—
Oh, fly—let us fly—ere we must!’
In terror she cried, letting sink her
Parasol till it trailed in the dust,—
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Parasol till it trailed in the dust,—
Till it sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
Then I pacified Mary and kissed her,
And tempted her into the room,
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the warning of doom,—
By some words that were warning of doom.
And I said, ‘What is written, sweet sister,
At the opposite end of the room?’
She sobbed as she answered, ‘All liquors
Must be paid for ere leaving the room.’”

Mr. Calverley is perhaps one of the best of the later parodists, and he hits off Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Coventry Patmore, and others most inimitably. We give a couple of verses from one, a parody of his upon a well-known lyric of Tennyson’s, and few we think after perusing it would be able to read “The Brook” without its murmur being associated with the wandering tinker:

“I loiter down by thorp and town;
For any job I’m willing;
Take here and there a dusty brown
And here and there a shilling.
·······
Thus on he prattled, like a babbling brook,
Then I; ‘The sun has slept behind the hill,
And my Aunt Vivian dines at half-past six.’
So in all love we parted: I to the Hall,
They to the village. It was noised next noon
That chickens had been missed at Syllabub Farm.”

Mr. Tennyson’s “Home they brought her warrior dead,” has likewise been differently travestied by various writers. One of these by Mr. Sawyer is given here:

The Recognition.

“Home they brought her sailor son,
Grown a man across the sea,
Tall and broad and black of beard,
And hoarse of voice as man may be.
Hand to shake and mouth to kiss,
Both he offered ere he spoke;
But she said, ‘What man is this
Comes to play a sorry joke?’
Then they praised him—call’d him ‘smart,’
‘Tightest lad that ever stept;’
But her son she did not know,
And she neither smiled nor wept.
Rose, a nurse of ninety years,
Set a pigeon-pie in sight;
She saw him eat—‘’Tis he! ’tis he!’—
She knew him—by his appetite!”

“The May-Queen” has also suffered in some verses called “The Biter Bit,” of which these are the last four lines:

“You may lay me in my bed, mother—my head is throbbing sore;
And, mother, prithee let the sheets be duly aired before;
And if you’d do a kindness to your poor desponding child,
Draw me a pot of beer, mother—and, mother, draw it mild!”