Classic Poem

TO MAURICE HEWLETT

Who's the romancer to tax our credulities?
Who but our hero, Sir Maurice de Hewlett, is!
Have I been reading your “Song of the Renny” thing?
Sure! and it's quite too exciting for anything.
Oh, but your ladies and knights are a fancy lot—
Pikpoynts and Blanchmains, Mabilla and Lanceilhot,
Borrowed from legend or chivalric chronicle,
Fierce-hearted women folk, braggarts thrasonical,
Nobles as gross as the Nile hippopotami,
Lawless and lustful and skilled in phlebotomy,
Villains that stab while the victim negotiates—
Hardly the kind one prefers as associates,
Innocent maidens enmeshed in the scheme of things—
Do you eat mince-pie to help you to dream of things?
Faith, 'tis a bedlam, the realm that you write about,
Freckled with castles and ladies to fight about.
Aye, 'tis a kingdom for raising the devil in,
Such as good Brother Jack London would revel in.
Bold is your fancy and wildly pictorial,
Strangely controlled and yet phantasmagorial.
Like your old churchmen you strive to illuminize,
Yet, in creating, you only half humanize,
Making your knights and their lovely affinities
Not men and women, but fallen divinities
Driven by Fate and their passions tyrannical.
Then,—but you'll say that I'm too Puritanical.
Though your morality somewhat too porous is,
You can sling language to beat the thesauruses.
So, go ahead with your epics of greater days,
Making us glad that we're living in later days.
Sing us your Iliads, Eddas, and Odysseys,
Sing us of ladies with palpitant bodices,
Long-sworded bravos and helmeted paladins,
Troubadours, vavasours, Richards, and Saladins!
Sing us of demoiselles, proudly imperial,
Clad in some soft, gauzy, purple material;
Sing us of donjon, portcullis, and bartizan,
Sing us of battle-ax, falchion, and partisan!
Sing us of females that strangle their relatives,
Sing us of poets with pretty appellatives,
Sing of the loves of the lamellibranchia—
Anything's better than Senhouse and Sanchia!