880 And drivels seas to set it well afloat.8
99
If he must fain sweep o'er the etherial plain,
And Pegasus9 runs restive in his 'waggon,'
Could he not beg the loan of Charles's Wain?1
Or pray Medea for a single dragon?2
885 Or if too classic for his vulgar brain, He fear'd his neck to venture such a nag on,
And he must needs mount nearer to the moon,
Could not the blockhead ask for a balloon?
100
'Pedlars,'3 and 'boats,' and 'waggons!' Oh! Ye shades
890 Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?
That trash of such sort not alone evades
Contempt, but from the bathos' vast abyss
Floats scumlike uppermost, and these Jack Cades4
Of sense and song above your graves may hiss?
895 The 'little boatman' and his 'Peter Bell'
Can sneer at him who drew 'Achitophel!'5
3. Boringly wordy passages of verse or prose wagon. (French). 2. When the Argonaut Jason abandoned Medea to
4. Robert Southey (1774-1843), poet laureate take a new wife, she murdered their sons to punish and author of a number of epic-length narrative him, then escaped in a chariot drawn by winged poems. dragons.
5. Epic poem (French). 3. Wordsworth's Peddler is the narrator of the 6. Horace s Art of Poetry 359: 'Sometimes great story in his early manuscript The Ruined Cottage Homer nods.' (p. 280), which was later incorporated into book 1 7. A reference to Wordsworth's long narrative of The Excursion (1814). poem The Waggoner (1819). 4. A rebel commoner who led an uprising against 8. In the prologue to his poem Peter Bell (1819), Henry VI in 1450. Wordsworth wishes for 'a little boat, / In shape a 5. I.e., John Dryden, author of the satiric Absalom very crescent-moon: / Fast through the clouds my and Achitophel (1681), whom Byron greatly boat can sail.' admired. Wordsworth had criticized Dryden's
9. The winged horse of Greek myth. poetry in the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface 1. The constellation known in the United States to his Poems (1815). as the Big Dipper. 'Wain' is an archaic term for
.
DON JUAN, CANTO 4 / 725
101
T' our tale.?The feast was over, the slaves gone,
The dwarfs and dancing girls had all retired;
The Arab lore and poet's song were done,
900
And every sound of revelry expired;
The lady and her lover, left alone,
The rosy flood of twilight's sky admired;?
Ave Maria!6 o'er the earth and sea,
That heavenliest hour of Heaven is worthiest thee!
102
905 Ave Maria! blessed be the hour!
The time, the clime, the spot, where I so oft
Have felt that moment in its fullest power
Sink o'er the earth so beautiful and soft,
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
910 Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft,
And not a breath crept through the rosy air,
And yet the forest leaves seem'd stirr'd with prayer.
103
Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of prayer!
