An After-Dinner Poem

(Terpsichore)

Read at the Annual Dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 24, 1843.

In narrowest girdle, O reluctant Muse,

In closest frock and Cinderella shoes,

Bound to the foot-lights for thy brief display,

One zephyr step, and then dissolve away!

. . . . . . . . . .

Short is the space that gods and men can spare

To Song's twin brother when she is not there.

Let others water every lusty line,

As Homer's heroes did their purple wine;

Pierian revellers! Know in strains like these

The native juice, the real honest squeeze, - -

Strains that, diluted to the twentieth power,

In yon grave temple might have filled an hour.

Small room for Fancy's many-chorded lyre,

For Wit's bright rockets with their trains of fire,

For Pathos, struggling vainly to surprise

The iron tutor's tear-denying eyes,

For Mirth, whose finger with delusive wile

Turns the grim key of many a rusty smile,

For Satire, emptying his corrosive flood

On hissing Folly's gas-exhaling brood,

The pun, the fun, the moral, and the joke,

The hit, the thrust, the pugilistic poke, -

Small space for these, so pressed by niggard Time,

Like that false matron, known to nursery rhyme, -

Insidious Morey, - scarce her tale begun,

Ere listening infants weep the story done.

Oh, had we room to rip the mighty bags

That Time, the harlequin, has stuffed with rags!

Grant us one moment to unloose the strings,

While the old graybeard shuts his leather wings.

But what a heap of motley trash appears

Crammed in the bundles of successive years!

As the lost rustic on some festal day

Stares through the concourse in its vast array, -

Where in one cake a throng of faces runs,

All stuck together like a sheet of buns, -

And throws the bait of some unheeded name,

Or shoots a wink with most uncertain aim,

So roams my vision, wandering over all,

And strives to choose, but knows not where to fall.

Skins of flayed authors, husks of dead reviews,

The turn-coat's clothes, the office-seeker's shoes,

Scraps from cold feasts, where conversation runs

Through mouldy toasts to oxidated puns,

And grating songs a listening crowd endures,

Rasped from the throats of bellowing amateurs;

Sermons, whose writers played such dangerous tricks

Their own heresiarchs called them heretics,

(Strange that one term such distant poles should link,

The Priestleyan's copper and the Puseyan's zinc);

Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs

A blindfold minuet over addled eggs,

Where all the syllables that end in ed,

Like old dragoons, have cuts across the head;

Essays so dark Champollion might despair

To guess what mummy of a thought was there,

Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase,

Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise;

Lectures that cut our dinners down to roots,

Or prove (by monkeys) men should stick to fruits, -

Delusive error, as at trifling charge

Professor Gripes will certify at large;

Mesmeric pamphlets, which to facts appeal,

Each fact as slippery as a fresh-caught eel;

And figured heads, whose hieroglyphs invite

To wandering knaves that discount fools at sight:

Such things as these, with heaps of unpaid bills,

And candy puffs and homoeopathic pills,

And ancient bell-crowns with contracted rim,

And bonnets hideous with expanded brim,

And coats whose memory turns the sartor pale,

Their sequels tapering like a lizard's tale, -

How might we spread them to the smiling day,

And toss them, fluttering like the new-mown hay,

To laughter's light or sorrow's pitying shower,

Were these brief minutes lengthened to an hour.

The narrow moments fit like Sunday shoes, -

How vast the heap, how quickly must we choose!

A few small scraps from out his mountain mass

We snatch in haste, and let the vagrant pass.

This shrunken CRUST that Cerberus could not bite,

Stamped (in one corner) "Pickwick copyright,"

Kneaded by youngsters, raised by flattery's yeast,

Was once a loaf, and helped to make a feast.

He for whose sake the glittering show appears

Has sown the world with laughter and with tears,

And they whose welcome wets the bumper's brim

Have wit and wisdom, - for they all quote him.

So, many a tongue the evening hour prolongs

With spangled speeches, - let alone the songs;

Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh,

And weak teetotals warm to half and half,

And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes,

Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens,

And wits stand ready for impromptu claps,

With loaded barrels and percussion caps,

And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys,

Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze;

While the great Feasted views with silent glee

His scattered limbs in Yankee fricassee.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays

The pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Self-love, grimalkin of the human heart,

Is ever pliant to the master's art;

Soothed with a word, she peacefully withdraws

And sheathes in velvet her obnoxious claws,

And thrills the hand that smooths her glossy fur

With the light tremor of her grateful purr.

But what sad music fills the quiet hall,

If on her back a feline rival fall!

And oh, what noises shake the tranquil house

If old Self-interest cheats her of a mouse.

Thou, O my country, hast thy foolish ways,

Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise;

But if the stranger touch thy modes or laws,

Off goes the velvet and out come the claws!

And thou, Illustrious! but too poorly paid

In toasts from Pickwick for thy great crusade,

Though, while the echoes labored with thy name,

The public trap denied thy little game,

Let other lips our jealous laws revile, -

The marble Talfourd or the rude Carlyle, -

But on thy lids, which Heaven forbids to close

Where'er the light of kindly nature glows,

Let not the dollars that a churl denies

Weigh like the shillings on a dead man's eyes!

Or, if thou wilt, be more discreetly blind,

Nor ask to see all wide extremes combined.

Not in our wastes the dainty blossoms smile

That crowd the gardens of thy scanty isle.

There white-cheeked Luxury weaves a thousand charms;

Here sun-browned Labor swings his naked arms.

Long are the furrows he must trace between

The ocean's azure and the prairie's green;

Full many a blank his destined realm displays,

Yet sees the promise of his riper days

Far through yon depths the panting engine moves,

His chariots ringing in their steel-shod grooves;

And Erie's naiad flings her diamond wave

O'er the wild sea-nymph in her distant cave!

While tasks like these employ his anxious hours,

What if his cornfields are not edged with flowers?

Though bright as silver the meridian beams

Shine through the crystal of thine English streams,

Turbid and dark the mighty wave is whirled

That drains our Andes and divides a world!

But lo! a PARCHMENT! Surely it would seem

The sculptured impress speaks of power supreme;

Some grave design the solemn page must claim

That shows so broadly an emblazoned name.

A sovereign's promise! Look, the lines afford

All Honor gives when Caution asks his word:

There sacred Faith has laid her snow-white hands,

And awful Justice knit her iron bands;

Yet every leaf is stained with treachery's dye,

And every letter crusted with a lie.

Alas! no treason has degraded yet

The Arab's salt, the Indian's calumet;

A simple rite, that bears the wanderer's pledge,

Blunts the keen shaft and turns the dagger's edge;

While jockeying senates stop to sign and seal,

And freeborn statesmen legislate to steal.

Rise, Europe, tottering with thine Atlas load,

Turn thy proud eye to Freedom's blest abode,

And round her forehead, wreathed with heavenly flame,

Bind the dark garland of her daughter's shame!

Ye ocean clouds, that wrap the angry blast,

Coil her stained ensign round its haughty mast,

Or tear the fold that wears so foul a scar,

And drive a bolt through every blackened star!

Once more, - once only, - - we must stop so soon:

What have we here? A GERMAN-SILVER SPOON;

A cheap utensil, which we often see

Used by the dabblers in aesthetic tea,

Of slender fabric, somewhat light and thin,

Made of mixed metal, chiefly lead and tin;

The bowl is shallow, and the handle small,

Marked in large letters with the name JEAN PAUL.

Small as it is, its powers are passing strange,

For all who use it show a wondrous change;

And first, a fact to make the barbers stare,

It beats Macassar for the growth of hair.

See those small youngsters whose expansive ears

Maternal kindness grazed with frequent shears;

Each bristling crop a dangling mass becomes,

And all the spoonies turn to Absaloms

Nor this alone its magic power displays,

It alters strangely all their works and ways;

With uncouth words they tire their tender lungs,

The same bald phrases on their hundred tongues

"Ever" "The Ages" in their page appear,

"Alway" the bedlamite is called a "Seer;"

On every leaf the "earnest" sage may scan,

Portentous bore! their "many-sided" man, -

A weak eclectic, groping vague and dim,

Whose every angle is a half-starved whim,

Blind as a mole and curious as a lynx,

Who rides a beetle, which he calls a "Sphinx."

And oh, what questions asked in clubfoot rhyme

Of Earth the tongueless and the deaf-mute Time!

Here babbling "Insight" shouts in Nature's ears

His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres;

There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb,

With "Whence am I?" and "Wherefore did I come?"

Deluded infants! will they ever know

Some doubts must darken o'er the world below,

Though all the Platos of the nursery trail

Their "clouds of glory" at the go-cart's tail?

Oh might these couplets their attention claim

That gain their author the Philistine's name

(A stubborn race, that, spurning foreign law,

Was much belabored with an ass's jaw.)

Melodious Laura! From the sad retreats

That hold thee, smothered with excess of sweets,

Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream,

Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream!

The slipshod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls,

The sophist's cobwebs hang thy roseate walls,

And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes

The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked "runes."

Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful hordes

That candied thoughts in amber-colored words,

And in the precincts of thy late abodes

The clattering verse-wright hammers Orphic odes.

Thou, soft as zephyr, wast content to fly

On the gilt pinions of a balmy sigh;

He, vast as Phoebus on his burning wheels,

Would stride through ether at Orion's heels.

Thy emblem, Laura, was a perfume-jar,

And thine, young Orpheus, is a pewter star.

The balance trembles, - be its verdict told

When the new jargon slumbers with the old!

. . . . . . . .

Cease, playful goddess! From thine airy bound

Drop like a feather softly to the ground;

This light bolero grows a ticklish dance,

And there is mischief in thy kindling glance.

To-morrow bids thee, with rebuking frown,

Change thy gauze tunic for a home-made gown,

Too blest by fortune if the passing day

Adorn thy bosom with its frail bouquet,

But oh, still happier if the next forgets

Thy daring steps and dangerous pirouettes!