Classic Poem

Bacchum in remotis carmina rupibus Vidi docentem

I saw old Dubbins—it's the solemn verity—
 In some obscure provincial town (the fact
Will pass for racy fiction with posterity)
 Intoning with considerable tact,
And not the faintest sign of insincerity,
 The service for the day; the pews were packed
With most devoted nymphs in killing bonnets,
A theme I've often thought would do for sonnets.

My mind recalled the last occasion when
 Those fluty tones had fallen on my ears;
Supported by a brace of boating men
 Dubbins had risen (incoherent cheers),
And starting by request with “Do ye ken?”
 Tailed off into “The British Grenadiers.”
I feel at times a kind of moral twist
In looking through the ordination list!

There is a period in woman's growth
 Which I will designate the Curate Age;
It falls between—and has a touch of both—
 The Military Era and the Stage;
Then with the tightest-laced (and nothing loth)
 The blooming young divine becomes the rage;
Their adulation takes the form of mittens,
Or carpet-slippers, or superfluous kittens.

Perchance there is a rival, one of those
 Extension Lecturers from Cambridge College;
Who “illustrates” immortal verse and prose,
 Of which he has a rather fluent knowledge;
They make him presents of the rathe-primrose,
 A practice which the Church would fain abolidge;
(I cull the form from Mrs. Gamp's anthology,
And tender to the same my frank apology.)

In matters of the heart, as I am told,
 Woman is thermometrically tidal,
Now secular and warm, now saintly cold,
 A state of things that's simply suicidal;
She'll oscillate like Israel of old
 Exchanging Moses for a Moulton idol;
The joke is not my own, I wish it were;
I also wish I were the Lecturer!

But whither, Muses, are ye footling on?
 We must return to trace our wandering sheep,
Lest the connexion of the tale be gone
 As happened with the muttons of Bo-Peep,
Or as the mild meandering of a Don
 Will lap a lecture-room in balmy sleep;
I don't know any medium that's neater
For circulating gas than Juan's metre.

So to return to Dubbins, as we knew him,
 Then, when the casual oat was being sown;
He didn't care what Plautus calls a duim
 For all the annotations of Perowne;
So open-minded that they trickled through him,
 So open-handed too that I have known
The double-headed bull-dog passing by
Irregularly wink the other eye

He never rowed, because his skin was porous
 And sensitive in parts to any scar;
His voice was fairly useful in a chorus;
 His wit was dry and suited to the bar;
Reckless at Pool he shed his lives before us,
 And seldom missed his due, the hero's star;
In battle he was good to break a head;
In peace he wore his toga to a thread.

I take it, there's a difference between
  This picture, see, and that —you know the phrase?
Think what he is, I say, and what he's been;
 (Excuse my mixing one of Kipling's lays
With Hamlet quoting Shakespeare to the Queen;)
 I never knew in all my palmy days
A nicer connoisseur of flowing bowls;
And now—he's got a sinecure of souls!