Bygone bards in baleful ballads would betoken...

Bygone bards in baleful ballads would betoken

Worlds of wretchedness and globes compact of gloom;

Pensive poets of the past have sung or spoken

Of the misery of mortals’ daily doom,

Of the hearts that are as hard as something oaken,

Of the blossoms that are blighted ere they bloom,

Of the ease with which a lover's vows are broken,

And the terrors of the tomb!

Now no longer‘ tis the minstrel's mawkish fashion

To narrate a tale of melancholy woe,

Of some wight whose face was haggard, wan, and ashen,

And who languished in the days of long ago,

Who adored, with pure but unrequited passion,

And a heart that was as soft as any dough,

A divine but unsusceptible Circassian

Who continued to say‘ No’!

For to-day our lays are light, our sonnets sprightly,

We adopt a tone inspiriting and blithe;

We can treat the saddest subjects fairly brightly,

And we never make our fellow-creatures writhe.

We regard all signs of sorrow as unsightly

And as dreary as the Esplanade at Hythe,

And in seas of lyric joy we swim as lightly

As a saithelse a lythe )!

And a poet who the populace enrages

By an out-of-date endeavour to combine

The dispiriting solemnity of sages

With the quill-work of the fretful porcupine,

Is considered so unworthy of his wages

That the public will not read a single line,

And his gems will never sparkle in the pages

Of a volume such as mine!