New Collected Rhymes

He makes it rhyme to “nurture.”
Ah, never was the English tongue
So flayed, and racked, and tortured,
Since one I love (who should be hung)
Made “tortured” rhyme to “orchard.”

Unkindly G – y’s raging pen
Next craves a rhyme to “sooner;”
Rejecting “Spooner,” (best of men,)
He fastens on lacuna(r).
Nay, worse, in his infatuate mind
He ends a line “explainer,”
Nor any rhyme can G – y find
Until he reaches Jena(r).

Yes, G – y shines the worst of all,
He needs to rhyme “embargo;”
The man had “Margot” at his call,
He had the good ship Argo;
Largo he had; yet doth he seek
Further, and no embargo
Restrains him from the odious, weak,
And Cockney rhyme, “Chicago”!

Ye Oxford Dons that Cockneys be,
Among your gardens tidy,
If you would ask a maid to tea,
D’ye call the girl “a lydy”?
And if you’d sing of Mr. Fry,
And need a rhyme to “swiper,”
Are you so cruel as to try
To fill the blank with “paper”?

Oh, Hoxford was a pleasant plice
To many a poet dear,
And Saccharissa had the grice
In Hoxford to appear.
But Waller, if to Cytherea
He prayed at any time,
Did not implore “her friendly ear,”
And think he had a rhyme.

Now, if you ask to what are due
The horrors which I mention,
I think we owe them to the U-
Niversity extension.
From Hoxton and from Poplar come
The ’Arriets and ’Arries,
And so the Oxford Muse is dumb,
Or, when she sings, miscarries.

Rococo

(“My name is also named ‘Played Out.’”)

When first we heard Rossetti sing,
We twanged the melancholy lyre,
We sang like this, like anything,
When first we heard Rossetti sing.
And all our song was faded Spring,
And dead delight and dark desire,
When first we heard Rossetti sing,
We twanged the melancholy lyre.

(And this is how we twanged it) —

The New Orpheus to his Eurydice

Why wilt thou woo, ah, strange Eurydice,
A languid laurell’d Orpheus in the shades,
For here is company of shadowy maids,
Hero, and Helen and Psamathoë:

And life is like the blossom on the tree,
And never tumult of the world invades,
The low light wanes and waxes, flowers and fades,
And sleep is sweet, and dreams suffice for me;

“Go back, and seek the sunlight,” as of old,
The wise ghost-mother of Odysseus said,
Here am I half content, and scarce a-cold,
But one light fits the living, one the dead;
Good-bye, be glad, forget! thou canst not hold
In thy kind arms, alas! this powerless head.

When first we heard Rossetti sing,
We also wrote this kind of thing!

The Food of Fiction

To breakfast, dinner, or to lunch
My steps are languid, once so speedy;
E’en though, like the old gent in Punch,
“Not hungry, but, thank goodness! greedy.”
I gaze upon the well-spread board,
And have to own – oh, contradiction!
Though every dainty it afford,
There’s nothing like the food of fiction.

“The better half” – how good the sound!