Classic Poem

Non usitata nec tenui ferar Penna

In singular and supple plumes
Adapted to airial transit
Your trusty bard, Horatius, blooms
Superbly and prepares to chance it.

Across illimitable space
Where worlds beneath are looking thinnish,
Where Envy cannot keep the pace
And Calumny neglects the finish.

Already on my turgid calf
I feel the feathers fresh and fluffy;
My massive shoulder-blades are half
Besmothered by a sort of puffy.

Excrescence where the wings fit on;
They tell me the effect is pretty;
And like the evanescent swan
I must oblige you with a ditty,

If not my first, at least my last,
In this particular connexion;
And sicklied over with the cast
Of pale and moribund reflexion.

But think not, Granta , dear, that I,
Your poor but strictly honest poet,
Am in a likely way to die!
Not altogether, if I know it!

O'er the round earth — and I surmise
The earth is virtually spheric —
Where bales of British merchandise
Are landed by the playful derrick;

Wherever war and whisky-stills
On missionary tracks have followed;
Where Lloyd's is read, or Beecham's pills
Enthusiastically swallowed;

Where lynchers regularly make
Mincemeat of niggers in Ohio,
Or where the Matabele break
The Chartered bank at Buluwayo;

There shall the Granta's pages prove
A source of high illumination;
And there my twenty odes shall move
The native mind to desperation.

Bound possibly in simple boards,
Perhaps in rather costly vellum,
I fancy how those heathen hordes
Would give their very scalps to spell 'em!

Then weep me not when I am fled
On pinions like a common fairy;
Besides, when all is done and said,
The thing is merely temporary;

Inane it were to celebrate
My vacuous urn with rosy posies;
Rather await an up-to-date
Example of metempsychosis.