Classic Poem

While others toil our country to supply
With what we need only for luxury,
Spices and silk in the rich East provide,
To glut our avarice and feed our pride;
You foreign learning prosperously transmit,
To raise our virtue and provoke our wit.
Such brave designs your generous soul inflame
To be a bold adventurer for fame;
How much obliged are Italy and France,
While with your voice their music you advance!
Your growing fame with envy can oppose,
Who sing with no less art than they compose;
In these attempts so few have had success,
Their beauties suffer in our English dress:
By artless hands spoiled of their native air,
They seldom pass for moderately fair.
As if you meant these injuries to atone,
You give them charms more conquering than their own;
Not like the dull laborious flatterer,
With secret art those graces you confer.
The skilful painters with slight strokes impart
That subtle beauty which affects the heart.
There are who publicly profess they hate
Translations, and yet all they write translate:
So proud they scorn to drive a lawful trade,
Yet by their wants are shameless pirates made.
These you incense while you their thefts reveal,
Or else prevent in what they mean to steal;
From all besides you are secure of praise,
But you so high our expectations raise,
A general discontent we shall declare
If such a workman only should repair.
You to the dead your piety have shown,
Adorned their monuments, now build your own
Drawn in the East; we in your lines may trace
That genius which of old inspired the place.
The banished muses back to Greece you bring,
Where their best airs you so divinely sing;
The world must own they are by you restored
To sacred shades, where they were first adored.