Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SCHOLAR AT HIS WIT'S END; A TALE, by WILLIAM COWPER



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THE SCHOLAR AT HIS WIT'S END; A TALE, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: In days when the learned, as old stories tell
Last Line: Poems, vol. I, p. 110.]


IN days when the learned, as old stories tell,
Were famous for raising his Highness of Hell,
A Scholar, with pot-hooks and hangers all bloody,
Succeeded, and conjur'd him into his study.
Now, though to excite him cost labour and pain,
It costs twice as much to lay him again,
And ne'er can be done, unless you can give
His De'ilship a task that he cannot atchieve.
So the Scholar enjoin'd him whatever he thought
Would puzzle him most, but he puzzled him not.
There was nothing so difficult, nothing so nice
But he did it, and show'd it him done in a trice.
At length said the Scholar (and look'd less aghast
For he surely believed he had hit it at last)
Go—fetch me a thing hard enough to defie
All force of impression, whatever we try.
Then he brought him a flint, but that would not do—
Then a bridling old maiden, but she yielded too—
Then he stood at a plunge, and feared he must go
Back again to his dreary apartment below,
But suddenly starting, as one just awake
From a nap that he had not intended to take—
"Oh how"—he exclaim'd—"could I be such a dunce!
"I have it—I'll furnish you with it at once."
So he went, and return'd twice as soon as before
With the heart of a plump Overseer of the Poor.
"Alas! " quoth the Student, with sorrowful face,
"I give up the point, 'tis a desperate case—
"I never shall lay thee, and woe to the art
"That taught me to raise thee, say I, from my heart,
"'Tis the thing in the world that I wish'd thee to miss,
"For thy own is not half so obdurate as This."

[Bodleian MS. From a copy in Cowper's handwriting in his Entry Book of his
Poems, vol. I, p. 110.]





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