New Collected Rhymes

He asketh in vain.

Ah, why is each “passing depression”
Of stories that gloomily bore
Received as the subtle expression
Of almost unspeakable lore?
In the dreary, the sickly, the grimy
Say, why do our women delight,
And wherefore so constantly ply me
With Ships in the Night?

Dear ladies, in vain you approach us,
With books to your taste in your hands;
For, alas! though you offer to coach us,
Yet the soul of no man understands
Why the grubby is always the moral,
Why the nasty’s preferred to the nice,
While you keep up a secular quarrel
With a gay little Vice;

Yes, a Vice with her lips full of laughter,
A Vice with a rose in her hair,
You condemn in the present and after,
To darkness of utter despair:
But a sin, if no rapture redeem it,
But a passion that’s pale and played out,
Or in surgical hands – you esteem it
Worth scribbling about!

What is sauce for the goose, for the gander
Is sauce, ye inconsequent fair!
It is better to laugh than to maunder,
And better is mirth than despair;
And though Life’s not all beer and all skittles,
Yet the Sun, on occasion, can shine,
And, mon Dieu! he’s a fool who belittles
This cosmos of Thine!

There are cakes, there is ale – ay, and ginger
Shall be hot in the mouth, as of old:
And a villain, with cloak and with whinger,
And a hero, in armour of gold,
And a maid with a face like a lily,
With a heart that is stainless and gay,
Make a tale worth a world of the silly
Sad trash of to-day!

Rhyme of Rhymes

Wild on the mountain peak the wind
Repeats its old refrain,
Like ghosts of mortals who have sinned,
And fain would sin again.

For “wind” I do not rhyme to “mind,”
Like many mortal men,
“Again” (when one reflects) ’twere kind
To rhyme as if “agen.”

I never met a single soul
Who spoke of “wind” as “wined,”
And yet we use it, on the whole,
To rhyme to “find” and “blind.”

We say, “Now don’t do that agen,”
When people give us pain;
In poetry, nine times in ten,
It rhymes to “Spain” or “Dane.”

Oh, which are wrong or which are right?
Oh, which are right or wrong?
The sounds in prose familiar, quite,
Or those we meet in song?

To hold that “love” can rhyme to “prove”
Requires some force of will,
Yet in the ancient lyric groove
We meet them rhyming still.

This was our learned fathers’ wont
In prehistoric times,
We follow it, or if we don’t,
We oft run short of rhymes.

Rhyme of Oxford Cockney Rhymes

(Exhibited in the Oxford Magazine.)

Though Keats rhymed “ear” to “Cytherea,”
And Morris “dawn” to “morn,”
A worse example, it is clear,
By Oxford Dons is “shorn.”
G – y, of Magdalen, goes beyond
These puny Cockneys far,
And to “Magrath” rhymes – Muse despond! —
“Magrath” he rhymes to “star”!

Another poet, X. Y. Z.,
Employs the word “researcher,”
And then, – his blood be on his head, —