Midwinter Madness.

    A month or twain to live on honeycomb
    Is pleasant, but to eat it for a year
    Is simply beastly.    Thus the poet spake,
    Feeling how sticky all his stomach was
    With hivings of ten thousand cheated bees.
    O wisdom that could shape immortal words
    And frame a diet for dyspeptic man!
    But what of turnips?    Come, a lyric now
    Upon the luscious roots unsung as yet,
    (Not roots I know but stalks; still, never mind,
    Metre and sauce will suit them just as well)
    Or shall we speak of omelettes?    Muse, begin!
    To feed a fortnight on transmuted eggs
    Would doubtless be both comforting and cheap
    But oh, the nausea on the fourteenth day!
    I'd rather read a book by Ezra Pound
    Then choke the seven hundredth omelette down,
    Just as I'd rather read some F. S. Flint
    Than live a month or twain on honeycomb.

    O Ezra Pound!    O omelette of the world!
    Concocted with strange herbs from dead Provence,
    Garlic from Italy and spice from Greece,
    Having suffered a rare Pound-change on the way,
    How rarely shouldst thou taste, were not the eggs
    Laid in America and hither brought
    Too late.    I don't like omelettes made with fowls.
    Take hence this Pound and put him to the test,
    Try him with acid, see if he turn black
    As will the best old silver, when enraged
    At touching fungi of the baser sort.
    (Forgive digression.    These similitudes
    Entrance me and I lose myself in them,
    As schoolboys, picking flowers by the way,
    Escape the angry usher's vigilance
    And then, concealed behind a hedge or shed,
    Produce the awesome pipe or thrice-lit fag
    And make themselves incredibly unwell.)
    My brain is bubbling and the thoughts will out,
    But, Ezra Pound! they turn again to thee,
    As surely as the lode-stone to the Pole
    Or as the dog to what he hath cast up
    (A simile of Solomon's, not mine)
    And your shock head of damp, unwholesome hay,
    Such as, the cunning farmer oft declares,
    When stacked, will perish by spontaneous fire,
    Frequents my dreams and makes them ludicrous.
    Thou most ridiculous sprite!    Thou ponderous fairy!
    Bourgeois Bohemian!    Innocent Verlaine!
    I read in The Booksellers' Circular
    That, in the University of Pa.
    (Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.
    A line of normal pattern, Saintsbury)
    You hold a fellowship in (O merciful gods!)
    Romanics, which strange word interpreted
    Means, I suppose, the Romance languages.
    Doubtless they read Italian in Pa.
    And some may speak French fluently in Ont.
    But German, Ezra!    There's the bloody rub,
    It's not Romance and it is hard to learn
    And Heine, though an easy-going chap,
    Would doubtless trounce you soundly if he knew
    The sorry hash that you have made of him.
    But no! you're not for immortality,
    Not even such as that of Freiligrath,
    Enshrined, together with his Mohrenfurst,
    In unrelenting amber.    I hold you here,
    In a soap-bubble's iridescent walls,
    The whimsy of a long midwinter night,
    And give you immortality enough.
    Thou sorry brat!    Thou transatlantic clown!
    That seek'st to ape the treadless Ariel
    And out-top Shelley in an aeroplane,
    Take the all-obvious padding from your pants
    And cut your hair and go to Pa. again
    (Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.
    Or even Oomp. if such a place exist)
    And take with you the poets you admire,
    Both Yeats and Flint to charm the folk of Oomp.
    And write again for Munsey's Magazine
    Of your good brother Everyone.    (Just God!
    Am even I of his relationship?)
    So end as you began or even worse:
    No matter, so 'tis in America.