Classic Poem

Ennobled? O Lord Alfred Tennyson!—
Now dare the curse, dig Shakspeare's bones
From underneath the Stratford-stones
And with a lordship prank the skeleton!

Men well may jeer and ask how thou hast gained
The right to have thy race renewed
And thy old Saxon red blood blued
By royal warrant, clarified, and strained.

What hast thou done that goes to make a lord?
The greatness by estate-in-tail
Which Nature gives the first-born male
Thou canst not claim as Art's reward.

Is not true greatness, like the poet, born?
Nobility of pedigree
May well by birthright look on thee
With half a dozen centuries of scorn.

Where are thy old manorial parks and halls,
A king's gift to a courtier's smile,
Or loot of French braves when the Isle
Was theirs and Englishmen were churls and thralls?

Where is the half-mile's length of corridor
Lined each side with thy pictured row
Of ancestors, whose grand airs show
The highness born above the need to soar?

With none of these beginnings, dost thou dare
To ape the greatness of the great?
Can Genius ancestors create—
Make old halls of its castles-in-the-air?

Genius may work its miracles with time—
May make past present and forelive
The future; but it cannot give
Blood-heirship of antiquity sublime.

But shall Caste's colorless anachronism
Change to the rainbow's living hues
And glory to thy sons diffuse
By being passed through thy poetic prism?

Pity the son with intellect too numb
To see that thy one natal word
Surnames him over all absurd
Tinsel of titles known to Christendom!