Midwinter Madness.

A month or twain to live on honeycomb         Is pleasant, but to eat it for a year         Is simply beastly.    Thus the poet spake,         Feeling how sticky all his stomach was         With hivings of ten thousand cheated bees.         O wisdom that could shape immortal words         And frame a diet for dyspeptic man!         But what of turnips?    Come, a lyric now         Upon the luscious roots unsung as yet,         (Not roots I know but stalks; still, never mind,         Metre and sauce will suit them just as well)         Or shall we speak of omelettes?    Muse, begin!         To feed a fortnight on transmuted eggs         Would doubtless be both comforting and cheap         But oh, the nausea on the fourteenth day!         I'd rather read a book by Ezra Pound         Then choke the seven hundredth omelette down,         Just as I'd rather read some F. S. Flint         Than live a month or twain on honeycomb.         O Ezra Pound!    O omelette of the world!         Concocted with strange herbs from dead Provence,         Garlic from Italy and spice from Greece,         Having suffered a rare Pound-change on the way,         How rarely shouldst thou taste, were not the eggs         Laid in America and hither brought         Too late.    I don't like omelettes made with fowls.         Take hence this Pound and put him to the test,         Try him with acid, see if he turn black         As will the best old silver, when enraged         At touching fungi of the baser sort.         (Forgive digression.    These similitudes         Entrance me and I lose myself in them,         As schoolboys, picking flowers by the way,         Escape the angry usher's vigilance         And then, concealed behind a hedge or shed,         Produce the awesome pipe or thrice-lit fag         And make themselves incredibly unwell.)         My brain is bubbling and the thoughts will out,         But, Ezra Pound! they turn again to thee,         As surely as the lode-stone to the Pole         Or as the dog to what he hath cast up         (A simile of Solomon's, not mine)         And your shock head of damp, unwholesome hay,         Such as, the cunning farmer oft declares,         When stacked, will perish by spontaneous fire,         Frequents my dreams and makes them ludicrous.         Thou most ridiculous sprite!    Thou ponderous fairy!         Bourgeois Bohemian!    Innocent Verlaine!         I read in The Booksellers' Circular         That, in the University of Pa.         (Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.         A line of normal pattern, Saintsbury)         You hold a fellowship in (O merciful gods!)         Romanics, which strange word interpreted         Means, I suppose, the Romance languages.         Doubtless they read Italian in Pa.         And some may speak French fluently in Ont.         But German, Ezra!    There's the bloody rub,         It's not Romance and it is hard to learn         And Heine, though an easy-going chap,         Would doubtless trounce you soundly if he knew         The sorry hash that you have made of him.         But no! you're not for immortality,         Not even such as that of Freiligrath,         Enshrined, together with his Mohrenfurst,         In unrelenting amber.    I hold you here,         In a soap-bubble's iridescent walls,         The whimsy of a long midwinter night,         And give you immortality enough.         Thou sorry brat!    Thou transatlantic clown!         That seek'st to ape the treadless Ariel         And out-top Shelley in an aeroplane,         Take the all-obvious padding from your pants         And cut your hair and go to Pa. again         (Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.         Or even Oomp. if such a place exist)         And take with you the poets you admire,         Both Yeats and Flint to charm the folk of Oomp.         And write again for Munsey's Magazine         Of your good brother Everyone.    (Just God!         Am even I of his relationship?)         So end as you began or even worse:         No matter, so 'tis in America.