But facts are facts: no Knight could be more true,
And firmer faith no Ladye-love desire;
We will omit the proofs, save one or two:
’Tis said no one in hand “can hold a fire
By thought of frosty Caucasus”404—but few,
I really think—yet Juan’s then ordeal
Was more triumphant, and not much less real.
XCVII
Here I might enter on a chaste description,
Having withstood temptation in my youth,405
But hear that several people take exception
At the first two books having too much truth;
Therefore I’ll make Don Juan leave the ship soon,
Because the publisher declares, in sooth,
Through needles’ eyes it easier for the camel is
To pass, than those two cantos into families.
XCVIII
’Tis all the same to me; I’m fond of yielding,
And therefore leave them to the purer page
Of Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding,
Who say strange things for so correct an age;406
I once had great alacrity in wielding
My pen, and liked poetic war to wage,
And recollect the time when all this cant
Would have provoked remarks—which now it shan’t.
XCIX
As boys love rows, my boyhood liked a squabble;
But at this hour I wish to part in peace,
Leaving such to the literary rabble;
Whether my verse’s fame be doomed to cease
While the right hand which wrote it still is able,
Or of some centuries to take a lease,
The grass upon my grave will grow as long,
And sigh to midnight winds, but not to song.
C
Of poets who come down to us through distance
Of time and tongues, the foster-babes of Fame,
Life seems the smallest portion of existence;
Where twenty ages gather o’er a name,
’Tis as a snowball which derives assistance
From every flake, and yet rolls on the same,
Even till an iceberg it may chance to grow;
But, after all, ’tis nothing but cold snow.
CI
And so great names are nothing more than nominal,
And love of Glory’s but an airy lust,
Too often in its fury overcoming all
Who would as ’twere identify their dust
From out the wide destruction, which, entombing all,
Leaves nothing till “the coming of the just”—
Save change: I’ve stood upon Achilles’ tomb,
And heard Troy doubted;407 Time will doubt of Rome.
CII
The very generations of the dead
Are swept away, and tomb inherits tomb,
Until the memory of an Age is fled,
And, buried, sinks beneath its offspring’s doom:
Where are the epitaphs our fathers read?
Save a few gleaned from the sepulchral gloom
Which once-named myriads nameless lie beneath,
And lose their own in universal Death.
CIII
I canter by the spot each afternoon
Where perished in his fame the hero-boy,
Who lived too long for men, but died too soon
For human vanity, the young De Foix!
A broken pillar, not uncouthly hewn,
But which Neglect is hastening to destroy,
Records Ravenna’s carnage on its face,
While weeds and ordure rankle round the base.408
CIV
I pass each day where Dante’s bones are laid:409
A little cupola, more neat than solemn,
Protects his dust, but reverence here is paid410
To the Bard’s tomb, and not the Warrior’s column:
The time must come, when both alike decayed,
The Chieftain’s trophy, and the Poet’s volume,
Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth,
Before Pelides’ death, or Homer’s birth.
CV
With human blood that column was cemented,
With human filth that column is defiled,
As if the peasant’s coarse contempt were vented
To show his loathing of the spot he soiled:411
Thus is the trophy used, and thus lamented
Should ever be those blood-hounds, from whose wild
Instinct of gore and glory Earth has known
Those sufferings Dante saw in Hell alone.412
CVI
Yet there will still be bards: though Fame is smoke,
Its fumes are frankincense to human thought;
And the unquiet feelings, which first woke
Song in the world, will seek what then they sought;413
As on the beach the waves at last are broke,
Thus to their extreme verge the passions brought
Dash into poetry, which is but Passion,
Or, at least, was so ere it grew a fashion.
CVII
If in the course of such a life as was
At once adventurous and contemplative,
Men who partake all passions as they pass,
Acquire the deep and bitter power to give414
Their images again as in a glass,
And in such colours that they seem to live;
You may do right forbidding them to show ’em,
But spoil (I think) a very pretty poem.415
CVIII
Oh! ye, who make the fortunes of all books!
Benign Ceruleans of the second sex!
Who advertise new poems by your looks,
Your “Imprimatur” will ye not annex?
What! must I go to the oblivious cooks,416
Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks?
Ah! must I then the only minstrel be,
Proscribed from tasting your Castalian tea!417
CIX
What! can I prove “a lion” then no more?
A ball-room bard, a foolscap, hot-press darling?
To bear the compliments of many a bore,
And sigh, “I can’t get out,” like Yorick’s starling;418
Why then I’ll swear, as poet Wordy swore
(Because the world won’t read him, always snarling),
That Taste is gone, that Fame is but a lottery,
Drawn by the blue-coat misses of a coterie.419
CX
Oh! “darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,”420
As some one somewhere sings about the sky,
And I, ye learnèd ladies, say of you;
They say your stockings are so—(Heaven knows why,
I have examined few pair of that hue);
Blue as the garters which serenely lie
Round the Patrician left-legs, which adorn
The festal midnight, and the levee morn.421
CXI
Yet some of you are most seraphic creatures—
But times are altered since, a rhyming lover,
You read my stanzas, and I read your features:
And—but no matter, all those things are over;
Still I have no dislike to learnèd natures,
For sometimes such a world of virtues cover;
I
