Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CHARADES: 3, by CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CHARADES: 3, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ere yet 'knowledge for the million'
Last Line: Thro' the two-mile-distant buck.


ERE yet "knowledge for the million"
Came out "neatly bound in boards";
When like Care upon a pillion
Matrons rode behind their lords:
Rarely, save to hear the Rector,
Forth did younger ladies roam;
Making pies, and brewing nectar
From the gooseberry-trees at home.

They'd not dreamed of Pau or Vevay;
Ne'er should into blossom burst
At the ball or at the levee;
Never come, in fact, my first:
Nor illumine cards by dozens
With some labyrinthine text,
Nor work smoking-caps for cousins
Who were pounding at my next.

Now have skirts, and minds, grown ampler;
Now not all they seek to do
Is create upon a sampler
Beasts which Buffon never knew:
But their venturous muslins rustle
O'er the cragstone and the snow,
Or at home their biceps muscle
Grows by practising the bow.

Worthy they those dames who, fable
Says, rode "palfreys" to the war
With some giant Thane, whose "sable
Destrier caracoled" before;
Smiled, as -- springing from the war-horse
As men spring in modern "cirques" --
He plunged, ponderous as a four-horse
Coach, among the vanished Turks: --

In the good times when the jester
Asked the monarch how he was,
And the landlady addrest her
Guests as "gossip" or as "coz";
When the Templar said, "Gramercy,"
Or, "'Twas shrewdly thrust, i' fegs,"
To Sir Halbert or Sir Percy
As they knocked him off his legs:

And, by way of mild reminders
That he needed coin, the Knight
Day by day extracted grinders
From the howling Israelite:
And my whole in merry Sherwood
Sent, with preterhuman luck,
Missiles -- not of steel but firwood --
Thro' the two-mile-distant buck.





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