Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SIGNAL: OR, A SATIRE AGAINST MODESTY, SELECTION, by FRANCIS HAWLING


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SIGNAL: OR, A SATIRE AGAINST MODESTY, SELECTION, by                    
First Line: How shall I tell the torments of that hour
Last Line: And ate out twelve months' labour at a meal.
Subject(s): Modesty; Satire (as Poetic Genre)


HOW shall I tell the torments of that hour,
The insolence of delegated power?
Name not the tyranny of cruel knaves,
Name not the passiveness of abject slaves:
With less remorse, he sacrificed my fame;
More sordid, I consented to my shame,
Full of resentments I could not express,
And 'gainst the powers of shame and self-redress.
But to continue—with imperious will
He draws from left to right his murdering quill;
A thousand tender things he now erased,
Expression mutilates and sense defaced;
What's warm from life and just to nature's laws,
He blotted out—not crueller the cause.
I begged that one soliloquy he'd spare;
He cut me short with a forbidding air:
'Sir, I shall careful be of your renown,
But I'm the judge what 'tis will please the town.'
Yet still constrained by hope or awed by fear,
I yielded—life on any terms is dear—
With the rough power implicitly complied,
So near are modesty and shame allied.
The counsel up, retired, I meekly took
The miserable fragments of my book,
With loss of limbs beheld my mangled boy;
Despair reproached: 'twas mercy to destroy.All mad with rage I down the back way
run,
Resolved the Muse and them forever more to shun.
Old Mother Puff, the turning of the street,
Raised paste round blighted fruit and offal meat;
Two yards' tarpaulin, cast above her shed,
Sheltered her stall, her utensils and bed;
For ornament was pasted round the place
Guy Warwick, George and Dragon, Chevy Chase;
Three ragged slaves of Troy's famed siege there stood,
And 'bout two-thirds of the Children in the Wood.
Part of a tattered blanket, help of skewer,
Covered her feeble limbs from cold secure;
Two inch of pipe within her leathern jaws,
One side emitting fumes, which t' other draws;
With parched hands pendant o'er a charcoal pan,
She sat complaining of the times and man.
'Goody!', quoth I, 'do you waste paper buy?'
'Sir—pray, a little louder—price?—which pie?'
Inclining of my head and she her ear:
'I've this, I say, to sell.'—'Um! yes, I hear;
You ask, if I mistake not, what I'll give.
Ah! master, it is very hard to live!'
Then drew her purse: 'Here's what I can afford,
If you'll be pleased to take 't.' I'm at a word:
'And is this all?—is that the most, my dame?'
'Indeed it is.'—'And what's this pie?'—'The same.'
Ware then for ware I took, my last appeal,
And ate out twelve months' labour at a meal.





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