Classic Poem

TO SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Gentle Sir Conan, I'll venture that few have been
Half as prodigiously lucky as you have been.
Fortune, the flirt! has been wondrously kind to you,
Ever beneficent, sweet, and refined to you.
Doomed though you seemed—one might swear without perjury—
Doomed to the practice of physic and surgery,
Yet, growing weary of pills and physicianing,
Off to the Arctic you packed, expeditioning.
Roving and dreaming, Ambition, that heady sin,
Gave you a spirit too restless for medicine;
That, I presume, as Romance is the quest of us,
Made you an Author—the same as the rest of us.
Ah, but the rest of us clamor distressfully,
“How do you manage the game so successfully?
Tell us, disclose to us how under Heaven you
Squeeze from the inkpot so splendid a revenue!”
Then, when you'd published your volume that vindicates
England's South African raid (or the Syndicate's),
Pleading that Britain's extreme bellicosity
Wasn't (as most of us think) an atrocity—
Straightway they gave you a cross with a chain to it—
(Oh, what an honor! I could not attain to it,
Not if I lived to the age of Methusalem!)
Made you a Knight of St. John of Jerusalem!
Faith! as a teller of tales you've the trick with you!
Still there's a bone I've been longing to pick with you:
Holmes is your hero of drama and serial;
All of us know where you dug the material
Whence he was molded—'tis almost a platitude;
Yet your detective, in shameless ingratitude—
Sherlock your sieuthhound with motives ulterior
Sneers at Poe's “Dupin” as “very inferior!”
Labels Gaboriau's clever “Lecoq,” indeed,
Merely “a bungler,” a creature to mock, indeed!
This, when your plots and your methods in story owe
More than a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau,
Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing.
Borrow, Sir Knight, but be decent in borrowing!
Still let us own that your bent is a cheery one,
Little you've written to bore or to weary one,
Plenty that's slovenly, nothing with harm in it,
Much with abundance of vigor and charm in it.
Give me detectives with brains analytical
Rather than weaklings with morals mephitical—
Stories of battles and man's intrepidity
Rather than wails of neurotic morbidity!
Give me adventures and fierce dinotheriums
Rather than Hewlett's ecstatic deliriums!
Frankly, Sir Conan, some hours I've eased with you
And, on the whole, I am pretty well pleased with you.