Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE ORGY ON PARNASSUS, by WILLIAM WATSON


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE ORGY ON PARNASSUS, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: You phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus
Last Line: And here was a bard shall outlast you all.
Alternate Author Name(s): Watson, John William
Subject(s): Language; Life; Love; Muses; Parnassus (mountain), Greece; Words; Vocabulary


YOU phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus,
With strangest words at your beck and call;
Who tumble your thoughts in a heap before us; --
Here was a bard shall outlast you all.

You prance on language, you force, you strain it,
You rack and you rive it, you twist it and maul.
Form, you abhor it, and taste, you disdain it, --
And here was a bard shall outlast you all.

Prosody gasps in your tortured numbers,
Your metres that writhe, your rhythms that sprawl;
And you make him turn in his marble slumbers,
The golden-tongued, who outsings you all.

Think you 'tis thus, in uncouth contortion,
That Song lives throned above thrones that fall?
Her handmaids are order and just proportion,
And measure and grace, that survive you all.

Are these and their kin proscribed and banished?
Serenely the exiles await recall,
To-morrow return, and find you vanished,
You and your antics and airs and all.

You may flout convention and scout tradition,
With courage as great as your art is small,
Where the kings of mind, with august submission,
Have bowed to the laws that outlast you all; --

But brief is the life of your mannered pages;
Your jargon, your attitudes, soon they pall:
You posture before the scornful ages,
And here was a voice shall outlive you all.

For in vain is the praise of discord sounded
Under the Muse's mountain wall.
With ritual old she is there surrounded;
Her great decorum rebukes you all.

Her hill is not taken by storm or leaguer;
The cliffs are sheer as the peaks are tall.
She foils in the clefts a pursuit too eager,
And breathlessly followed eludes you all.

She is won as a bride, with reverent wooing,
Not haled by the hair, a captor's thrall:
Such barbarous love is its own undoing;
And here was a bard shall outlast you all.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net