Classic Poem

Odi profanum vulgus et arceo

I hate your vulgar modern breeds,
New Woman, prig and poetaster,
Your fin-de-race that never reads
A page of any ancient Master.

Where are they now, those brave and stout
World-old and weather-beaten skippers?
Their wassail-bowl is going out;
Absinthe's the thing for little nippers

Maybe one writer's little mess
Is more suggestive than another's;
One painter's chic a shadow less
Purely preposterous than his brother's.

Precocity, that knows no law,
Binds them in boards — a weary medley;
All advertising, cheek by jaw;
And the result is something deadly.

Some fancies by a hanging sword,
Some by a risky pen are tickled;
The appetite of these is bored,
They take their garlic highly pickled.

While others, sick of seasoning,
And spicy literary diet,
Will seldom taste the latest thing,
And absolutely never buy it.

Some even miss with mild regret
The age of Smiles and Martin Tupper,
Ere Curiosity had set
Her straddling legs across the crupper.

They sigh for schools of cleric bent,
The tonsured head, austere, ascetic;
And loathe the love-locks redolent
Of gummy Araby's cosmetic.

To them the sweepings of the sink
Are not Sibyllinische blätter ;
An Aster by the sewer's brink
Is simply that and nothing better

" Why change, " say they, " our Sabine food
For mullet murdered in the ditches?
Why barter modest maidenhood
For rampant women's borrowed breeches? "