Thomas Moore- Collected Poetical Works

Home > Other > Thomas Moore- Collected Poetical Works > Page 112
Thomas Moore- Collected Poetical Works Page 112

by Thomas Moore


  “A waiter still I might have long remained,

  “And long the club-room’s jokes and glasses drained;

  “But ah! in luckless hour, this last December,

  “I wrote a book,4 and Colburn dubbed me ‘Member’ —

  “‘Member of Brooks’s!’ — oh Promethean puff,

  “To what wilt thou exalt even kitchen-stuff!

  “With crumbs of gossip, caught from dining wits,

  “And half-heard jokes, bequeathed, like half-chewed bits,

  “To be, each night, the waiter’s perquisites; —

  “With such ingredients served up oft before,

  “But with fresh fudge and fiction garnisht o’er,

  “I managed for some weeks to dose the town,

  “Till fresh reserves of nonsense ran me down;

  “And ready still even waiters’ souls to damn,

  “The Devil but rang his bell, and — here I am; —

  “Yes— ‘Coming up, Sir,’ once my favorite cry,

  “Exchanged for ‘Coming down, Sir,’ here am I!”

  Scarce had the Spectre’s lips these words let drop,

  When, lo! a breeze — such as from— ‘s shop

  Blows in the vernal hour when puffs prevail,

  And speeds the sheets and swells the lagging sale —

  Took the poor waiter rudely in the poop,

  And whirling him and all his grisly group

  Of literary ghosts — Miss X. Y. Z. —

  The nameless author, better known than read —

  Sir Jo — the Honorable Mr. Lister,

  And last, not least, Lord Nobody’s twin-sister —

  Blew them, ye gods, with all their prose and rhymes

  And sins about them, far into those climes

  “Where Peter pitched his waistcoat”5 in old times,

  Leaving me much in doubt as on I prest,

  With my great master, thro’ this realm unblest,

  Whether Old Nick or Colburn puffs the best.

  1 The classical term for money.

  2 Rosa Matilda, who was for many years the writer of the political articles in the journal alluded to, and whose spirit still seems to preside— “regnat Rosa” — over its pages.

  3 Not the charming L. E. L., and still less, Mrs. F. H., whose poetry is among the most beautiful of the present day.

  4 “History of the Clubs of London,” announced as by “a Member of Brooks’s.”

  5A Dantesque allusion to the old saying “Nine miles beyond Hell, where Peter pitched his waistcoat.”

  LAMENT FOR THE LOSS OF LORD BATHURST’S TAIL.1

  All in again — unlookt for bliss!

  Yet, ah! one adjunct still we miss; —

  One tender tie, attached so long

  To the same head, thro’ right and wrong.

  Why, Bathurst, why didst thou cut off

  That memorable tail of thine?

  Why — as if one was not enough —

  Thy pig-tie with thy place resign,

  And thus at once both cut and run?

  Alas! my Lord, ’twas not well done,

  ’Twas not, indeed, — tho’ sad at heart,

  From office and its sweets to part,

  Yet hopes of coming in again,

  Sweet Tory hopes! beguiled our pain;

  But thus to miss that tail of thine,

  Thro’ long, long years our rallying sign —

  As if the State and all its powers

  By tenancy in tail were ours —

  To see it thus by scissors fall,

  This was “the unkindest cut of all!”

  It seemed as tho’ the ascendant day

  Of Toryism had past away,

  And proving Samson’s story true,

  She lost her vigor with her queue.

  Parties are much like fish, ’tis said —

  The tail directs them, not the head;

  Then how could any party fail,

  That steered its course by Bathurst’s tail?

  Not Murat’s plume thro’ Wagram’s fight

  E’er shed such guiding glories from it,

  As erst in all true Tories sight,

  Blazed from our old Colonial comet!

  If you, my Lord, a Bashaw were,

  (As Wellington will be anon)

  Thou mightst have had a tail to spare;

  But no! alas! thou hadst but one,

  And that — like Troy, or Babylon,

  A tale of other times — is gone!

  Yet — weep ye not, ye Tories true —

  Fate has not yet of all bereft us;

  Though thus deprived of Bathurst’s queue,

  We’ve Ellenborough’s curls still left us: —

  Sweet curls, from which young Love, so vicious,

  His shots, as from nine-pounders, issues;

  Grand, glorious curls, which in debate

  Surcharged with all a nation’s fate,

  His Lordship shakes, as Homer’s God did,2

  And oft in thundering talk comes near him;

  Except that there the speaker nodded

  And here ’tis only those who hear him.

  Long, long, ye ringlets, on the soil

  Of that fat cranium may ye flourish,

  With plenty of Macassar oil

  Thro’ many a year your growth to nourish!

  And ah! should Time too soon unsheath

  His barbarous shears such locks to sever,

  Still dear to Tories even in death,

  Their last loved relics we’ll bequeath,

  A hair-loom to our sons for ever.

  1 The noble Lord, as is well known, cut off this much-respected appendage on his retirement from office some months since.

  2 “Shakes his ambrosial curls, and gives the nod.” — Pope’s Homer.

  THE CHERRIES.

  A PARABLE.1

  1838.

  See those cherries, how they cover

  Yonder sunny garden wall; —

  Had they not that network over,

  Thieving birds would eat them all.

  So to guard our posts and pensions,

  Ancient sages wove a net,

  Thro’ whose holes of small dimensions

  Only certain knaves can get.

  Shall we then this network widen;

  Shall we stretch these sacred holes,

  Thro’ which even already slide in

  Lots of small dissenting souls?

  “God forbid!” old Testy crieth;

  “God forbid!” so echo I;

  Every ravenous bird that flieth

  Then would at our cherries fly.

  Ope but half an inch or so,

  And, behold! what bevies break in; —

  Here some curst old Popish crow

  Pops his long and lickerish beak in;

  Here sly Arians flock unnumbered,

  And Socinians, slim and spare,

  Who with small belief encumbered

  Slip in easy anywhere; —

  Methodists, of birds the aptest,

  Where there’s pecking going on;

  And that water-fowl, the Baptist —

  All would share our fruits anon;

  Every bird of every city,

  That for years with ceaseless din,

  Hath reverst the starling’s ditty,

  Singing out “I can’t get in.”

  “God forbid!” old Testy snivels;

  “God forbid!” I echo too;

  Rather may ten thousand devils

  Seize the whole voracious crew!

  If less costly fruits won’t suit ’em,

  Hips and haws and such like berries,

  Curse the cormorants! stone ’em, shoot ’em,

  Anything — to save our cherries.

  1 Written during the late discussion on the Test and Corporation Acts.

  STANZAS WRITTEN IN ANTICIPATION OF DEFEAT.1

  1828.

  Go seek for some abler defenders of wrong,

&nbs
p; If we must run the gantlet thro’ blood and expense;

  Or, Goths as ye are, in your multitude strong,

  Be content with success and pretend not to sense.

  If the words of the wise and the generous are vain,

  If Truth by the bowstring must yield up her breath,

  Let Mutes do the office — and spare her the pain

  Of an Inglis or Tyndal to talk her to death.

  Chain, persecute, plunder — do all that you will —

  But save us, at least, the old womanly lore

  Of a Foster, who, dully prophetic of ill,

  Is at once the two instruments, AUGUR2 and BORE.

  Bring legions of Squires — if they’ll only be mute —

  And array their thick heads against reason and right,

  Like the Roman of old, of historic repute,3

  Who with droves of dumb animals carried the fight;

  Pour out from each corner and hole of the Court

  Your Bedchamber lordlings, your salaried slaves,

  Who, ripe for all job-work, no matter what sort,

  Have their consciences tackt to their patents and staves.

  Catch all the small fry who, as Juvenal sings,

  Are the Treasury’s creatures, wherever they swim;

  With all the base, time-serving toadies of Kings,

  Who, if Punch were the monarch, would worship even him;

  And while on the one side each name of renown

  That illumines and blesses our age is combined;

  While the Foxes, the Pitts, and the Cannings look down,

  And drop o’er the cause their rich mantles of Mind;

  Let bold Paddy Holmes show his troops on the other,

  And, counting of noses the quantum desired,

  Let Paddy but say, like the Gracchi’s famed mother,

  “Come forward, my jewels”— ’tis all that’s required.

  And thus let your farce be enacted hereafter —

  Thus honestly persecute, outlaw and chain;

  But spare even your victims the torture of laughter,

  And never, oh never, try reasoning again!

  1 During the discussion of the Catholic question in the House of Commons last session.

  2 This rhyme is more for the ear than the eye, as the carpenter’s tool is spelt auger.

  3 Fabius, who sent droves of bullock against the enemy.

  ODE TO THE WOODS AND FORESTS.

  BY ONE OF THE BOARD.

  1828.

  Let other bards to groves repair,

  Where linnets strain their tuneful throats;

  Mine be the Woods and Forests where

  The Treasury pours its sweeter notes.

  No whispering winds have charms for me,

  Nor zephyr’s balmy sighs I ask;

  To raise the wind for Royalty

  Be all our Sylvan zephyr’s task!

  And ‘stead of crystal brooks and floods,

  And all such vulgar irrigation,

  Let Gallic rhino thro’ our Woods

  Divert its “course of liquidation.”

  Ah, surely, Vergil knew full well

  What Woods and Forests ought to be,

  When sly, he introduced in hell

  His guinea-plant, his bullion-tree;1 —

  Nor see I why, some future day,

  When short of cash, we should not send

  Our Herries down — he knows the way —

  To see if Woods in hell will lend.

  Long may ye flourish, sylvan haunts,

  Beneath whose “branches of expense”

  Our gracious King gets all he wants, —

  Except a little taste and sense.

  Long, in your golden shade reclined.

  Like him of fair Armida’s bowers,

  May Wellington some wood-nymph find,

  To cheer his dozenth lustrum’s hours;

  To rest from toil the Great Untaught,

  And soothe the pangs his warlike brain

  Must suffer, when, unused to thought,

  It tries to think and — tries in vain.

  Oh long may Woods and Forests be

  Preserved in all their teeming graces,

  To shelter Tory bards like me

  Who take delight in Sylvan places!

  1 Called by Vergil, botanically, “species aurifrondentis.”

  STANZAS FROM THE BANKS OF THE SHANNON.1

  1828.

  “Take back the virgin page.”

  MOORE’S Irish Melodies.

  No longer dear Vesey, feel hurt and uneasy

  At hearing it said by the Treasury brother,

  That thou art a sheet of blank paper, my Vesey,

  And he, the dear, innocent placeman, another.2

  For lo! what a service we Irish have done thee; —

  Thou now art a sheet of blank paper no more;

  By St. Patrick, we’ve scrawled such a lesson upon thee

  As never was scrawled upon foolscap before.

  Come — on with your spectacles, noble Lord Duke,

  (Or O’Connell has green ones he haply would lend you,)

  Read Vesey all o’er (as you can’t read a book)

  And improve by the lesson we bog-trotters send you;

  A lesson, in large Roman characters traced,

  Whose awful impressions from you and your kin

  Of blank-sheeted statesmen will ne’er be effaced —

  Unless, ‘stead of paper, you’re mere asses’ skin.

  Shall I help you to construe it? ay, by the Gods,

  Could I risk a translation, you should have a rare one;

  But pen against sabre is desperate odds,

  And you, my Lord Duke (as you hinted once), wear one.

  Again and again I say, read Vesey o’er; —

  You will find him worth all the old scrolls of papyrus

  That Egypt e’er filled with nonsensical lore,

  Or the learned Champollion e’er wrote of, to tire us.

  All blank as he was, we’ve returned him on hand,

  Scribbled o’er with a warning to Princes and Dukes,

  Whose plain, simple drift if they won’t understand,

  Tho’ carest at St. James’s, they’re fit for St. Luke’s.

  Talk of leaves of the Sibyls! — more meaning conveyed is

  In one single leaf such as now we have spelled on,

  Than e’er hath been uttered by all the old ladies

  That ever yet spoke, from the Sibyls to Eldon.

  1 These verses were suggested by the result of the Clare election, in the year 1828, when the Right Honorable W. Vesey Fitzgerald was rejected, and Mr. O’Connell returned.

  2 Some expressions to this purport, in a published letter of one of these gentlemen, had then produced a good deal of amusement.

  THE ANNUAL PILL.

  Supposed to be sung by OLD PROSY, the Jew, in the character of Major

  CARTWRIGHT.

  Vill nobodies try my nice Annual Pill,

  Dat’s to purify every ting nashty avay?

  Pless ma heart, pless ma heart, let ma say vat I vill,

  Not a Chrishtian or Shentleman minds vat I say.

  ’Tis so pretty a bolus! — just down let it go,

  And, at vonce, such a radical shange you vill see,

  Dat I’d not be surprished, like de horse in de show,

  If your heads all vere found, vere your tailsh ought to be!

  Vill nobodies try my nice Annual Pill, etc.

  ‘Twill cure all Electors and purge away clear

  Dat mighty bad itching dey’ve got in deir hands —

  ‘Twill cure too all Statesmen of dulness, ma tear,

  Tho’ the case vas as desperate as poor Mister VAN’S.

  Dere is noting at all vat dis Pill vill not reach —

  Give the Sinecure Ghentleman van little grain,

  Pless ma heart, it vill act, like de salt on de leech,

  And he’ll throw de pounds, shillings, and
pence, up again!

  Vill nobodies try my nice Annual Pill, etc.

  ’Twould be tedious, ma tear, all its peauties to paint —

  “But, among oder tings fundamentally wrong,

  It vill cure de Proad Pottom1 — a common complaint

  Among M.P.’s and weavers — from sitting too long.

  Should symptoms of speeching preak out on a dunce

  (Vat is often de case), it vill stop de disease,

  And pring avay all de long speeches at vonce,

  Dat else vould, like tape-worms, come by degrees!

  Vill nobodies try my nice Annual Pill,

  Dat’s to purify every ting nashty avay?

  Pless ma heart, pless ma heart, let me say vat I vill,

  Not a Chrishtian or Shentleman minds vat I say!

  1 Meaning, I presume, Coalition Administrations.

  “IF” AND “PERHAPS.”1

  Oh tidings of freedom! oh accents of hope!

  Waft, waft them, ye zephyrs, to Erin’s blue sea,

  And refresh with their sounds every son of the Pope,

  From Dingle-a-cooch to far Donaghadee.

  “If mutely the slave will endure and obey,

  “Nor clanking his fetters nor breathing his pains,

  “His masters perhaps at some far distant day

  “May think (tender tyrants!) of loosening his chains.”

  Wise “if” and “perhaps!” — precious salve for our wounds,

  If he who would rule thus o’er manacled mutes,

  Could check the free spring-tide of Mind that resounds,

  Even now at his feet, like the sea at Canute’s.

  But, no, ’tis in vain — the grand impulse is given —

  Man knows his high Charter, and knowing will claim;

  And if ruin must follow where fetters are riven,

  Be theirs who have forged them the guilt and the shame.

  “If the slave will be silent!” — vain Soldier, beware —

  There is a dead silence the wronged may assume,

  When the feeling, sent back from the lips in despair,

  But clings round the heart with a deadlier gloom; —

  When the blush that long burned on the suppliant’s cheek,

  Gives place to the avenger’s pale, resolute hue;

  And the tongue that once threatened, disdaining to speak,

  Consigns to the arm the high office — to do.

  If men in that silence should think of the hour

  When proudly their fathers in panoply stood,

  Presenting alike a bold front-work of power

  To the despot on land and the foe on the flood: —

  That hour when a Voice had come forth from the west,

 

‹ Prev