Classic Poem

Intermissa, Venus, diu

Your card to hand the other day,
In terms concise but gracious,
The intermitted song, you say,
Is due from your Horatius;
O spare me, please; Old Time of late
Has played the filibuster;
I feel as one whose glass of fate
Has shed another lustre.

Though age and anguish, I'll allow,
Have not impaired my dinner,
The locks upon my ardent brow
Perceptibly grow thinner;

And there's a younger, smarter race
All blowin' and a-growin'
Should ply the pen and push the pace
To keep the type a-flowin'.

Yet was there one of riper age
Who bore from Cambridge portals
The sacred flame of persiflage
To London's palsied mortals;
Full well they know, who know the Ropes,
His form of ample tether,
Prometheus of a hundred tropes
Bound in Morocco leather.

A fallen Don, a rising Star,
I fancy how he faces
Those nymphs with their conducting Carr,
And puts 'em through their paces.
I see him prompt, with lips aghast,
That somersaulting fairy,
Letitia, as she gives his last
Carmen Peculiare.

Perchance himself he beats the floor
In Old Aunt-Salian fashion,
Till half the supers in the corps
Go Bang with lyric passion;
Yes, Sir, his genius is such
That you should interview it,
And find by what inspired touch
He manages to do it.

Strange effort of the lecture-desk!
That turns a College Fellow
Into a Rossius of burlesque
When getting nicely mellow;
Exceptions prove the rule, no doubt,
Of rhymes with age abating;
I haven't time to work it out,
Because the printer's waiting.