Master Bee, as you wanton among the sweet flowers, On your busy, gay loaferage speeding, Is there any bee-critic to poison your hours With advice as to regular feeding? Master Thrush, now a-sulk with a sniff for a song, Now a-tilt in a frenzy ecstatic, Is there any thrush Solon to tell you how wrong Is singing thus wild and erratic? Master Butterfly, lying along the smooth breeze, Or tumbling on meadow-waves surging, Do butterfly wiseacres trouble your ease, Some regular exercise urging? Merry masters, pray tell: what reply shall I make To their dull and redoubtable pleading Who bid me such frolics as yours to forsake For a course of regular reading? Can I hope to explain how a nibble of Lamb Makes Bacon the easier eating? How a wee sip of Burns, just the tiniest dram, Clears the mind for a Miltonic meeting? Can I make them perceive, with my Shakespeare and Grote, How the first gains strength from the other, As that mystic old giant more mightily smote Each time that he touched his Earth mother? Do you think they will see how we verily know, In defiance of regular order, All the nooks of the woods, all the flowers where they grow, While they have but crept through the border? Cry pooh! on the Solons. No warrant have we To be wretched that we may delight them. Come, Browning, thrush, Dickens, Locke, Bunyan, and bee; Let's be foolish and happy to spite them! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ENGLAND'S DEAD by FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS EPITAPHS OF THE WAR, 1914-18: BOMBER IN LONDON by RUDYARD KIPLING FIDELIS by ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER TO THE FONT-GEORGES by THEODORE FAULLAIN DE BANVILLE ELEGIAC SONNET TO A MOPSTICK by WILLIAM BECKFORD THE BRIDE'S TRAGEDY by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES THE GARDEN WHERE THERE IS NO WINTER by LOUIS JAMES BLOCK |