A Satire Anthology

Автор

Carolyn Wells

Год написания книги

2017

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“Miss Blank,” at “Blank.” Jemima, let it go;
And I, meanwhile, will idle with “Sir Walter.”
Stay, let me keep the first rough copy, though —
’Twill serve again. There’s but the name to alter,
And Love, that starves, must knock at every portal,
In forma pauperis. We are but mortal!

    Austin Dobson.

FAME

ALL over the world we sing of Fame,
Bright as a bubble, and hollow;
With a breath men make it and give it a name;
All over the world they sing the same,
And the beautiful bubble follow.

Its rounded, splendid, gossamer walls
Hide more than our fairy fancies:
For here, in the vaulted, antique halls,
’Mid oriel splendours, a light foot falls,
And a fairy figure dances.

And men will do for a glancing eye,
And foot that tarries never,
More, far more than look and sigh;
For men will fight, and man will die,
But follow it on for ever.

    James Herbert Morse.

FIVE LIVES

FIVE mites of monads dwelt in a round drop
That twinkled on a leaf by a pool in the sun.
To the naked eye they lived invisible;
Specks, for a world of whom the empty shell
Of a mustard-seed had been a hollow sky.

One was a meditative monad, called a sage;
And, shrinking all his mind within, he thought:
“Tradition, handed down for hours and hours,
Tells that our globe, this quivering crystal world,
Is slowly dying. What if, seconds hence
When I am very old, yon shimmering doom
Comes drawing down and down, till all things end?”
Then with a wizen smirk he proudly felt
No other mote of God had ever gained
Such giant grasp of universal truth.

One was a transcendental monad; thin
And long and slim of mind; and thus he mused:
“Oh, vast, unfathomable monad-souls!
Made in the image” – a horse frog croaks from the pool,
“Hark! ’twas some god, voicing his glorious thought
In thunder-music. Yea, we hear their voice,
And we may guess their minds from ours, their work.
Some taste they have like ours, some tendency
To wriggle about, and munch a trace of scum.”
He floated up on a pin-point bubble of gas,
That burst, pricked by the air, and he was gone.

One was a barren-minded monad, called
A positivist, and he knew positively:
“There was no world beyond this certain drop.
Prove me another! Let the dreamers dream
Of their faint gleams, and noises from without,
And higher and lower; life is life enough.”
Then swaggering half a hair’s-breath hungrily,
He seized upon an atom of bug, and fed.

One was a tattered monad, called a poet,
And with a shrill voice ecstatic thus he sang:
“Oh, little female monad’s lips!
Oh, little female monad’s eyes!
Ah, the little, little, female, female monad!”
The last was a strong-minded monadess,
Who dashed amid the infusoria,
Danced high and low, and wildly spun and dove,
Till the dizzy others held their breath to see.

But while they led their wondrous little lives,
Æonian moments had gone wheeling by,
The burning drop had shrunk with fearful speed;
A glistening film – ’twas gone; the leaf was dry.
The little ghost of an inaudible squeak
Was lost to the frog that goggled from his stone;
Who, at the huge, slow tread of a thoughtful ox
Coming to drink, stirred sideways fatly, plunged,
Launched backward twice, and all the pool was still.

    Edward Rowland Sill.

HE AND SHE

WHEN I am dead you’ll find it hard,
Said he,
To ever find another man
Like me.