Classic Poem

Spirit

Thunder and rain! O dear, O dear!
But see, a noble shelter here,
This grand arcade where our Venetian
Has formed of Gothic and of Grecian
A combination strange, but striking,
And singularly to my liking.
Let moderns reap where ancients sowed—
I at least make it my abode.
And now let's hear your famous ode:
‘Through the great sinful’—how d'ye go on?
For Principles of Art and so on
I care perhaps about three curses,
But hold myself a judge of verses.

Dipsychus

‘My brain was lightened when my tongue had said,
“Christ is not risen”’

*****

Spirit

Well, now it's anything but clear
What is the tone that's taken here;
What is your logic? What's your theology?
Is it or is it not neology?
That's a great fault; you're this and that,
And here and there, and nothing flat.
Yet writing's golden word what is it,
But the three syllables, ‘explicit’?
Say, if you cannot help it, less,
But what you do put, put express.
I fear that rule won't meet your feeling;
You think half-showing, half-concealing,
Is God's own method of revealing.

Dipsychus

To please my own poor mind! To find repose;
To physic the sick soul; to furnish vent
To diseased humours in the moral frame.

Spirit

A sort of seton, I suppose,
A moral bleeding at the nose.

Dipsychus

Interpret it I cannot; I but wrote it.

Spirit

Perhaps; but none that read can doubt it,
There is a strong Strauss-smell about it.
Heavens! at your years your time to fritter
Upon a critical hair-splitter!
Take larger views (and quit your Germans)
From the Analogy and Sermons;
I fancied—you must doubtless know—
Butler had proved, an age ago,
That in religious as profane things
'Twas useless trying to explain things;
Men's business-wits the only sane things,
These and compliance are the main things.
God, Revelation, and the rest of it,
Bad at the best, we make the best of it.
Not quite the things we chose to think;
But neither is the World rose pink.
Yet it is fact as plain as day;
So may the rest be; who can say?
Thus life we see is wondrous odd,
And so, we argue, may be God.
At any rate, this rationalistic
Half-puritano-semitheistic
Cross of Neologist and Mystic
Is, of all doctrines, the least reasonable—
And of all topics most unseasonable.
Why should you fancy you know more of it
Than all the old folks that thought before of it?
Like a good subject and wise man,
Believe whatever things you can.
Take your religion as 'twas found you,
And say no more of it—confound you!
And now I think the rain has ended—
And the less said, the sooner mended.