No More Learning

What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield
Against such gentle foes to take the field
Whose beckoning hands the mild Caduceus wield?

POET

What think I now? Even what I thought before;--
What Butler boasts though Butler may deplore,
Still I repeat, words lead me not astray
When the shown feeling points a different way.
Smooth Butler can say grace at slander's feast,
And bless each haut-gout cook'd by monk or priest;
Leaves the full lie on Butler's gong to swell,
Content with half-truths that do just as well;
But duly decks his mitred comrade's flanks,
And with him shares the Irish nation's thanks!

So much for you, my friend! who own a Church,
And would not leave your mother in the lurch!
But when a Liberal asks me what I think--
Scared by the blood and soot of Cobbett's ink,
And Jeffrey's glairy phlegm and Connor's foam,
In search of some safe parable I roam--
An emblem sometimes may comprise a tome!

Disclaimant of his uncaught grandsire's mood,
I see a tiger lapping kitten's food:
And who shall blame him that he purs applause,
When brother Brindle pleads the good old cause;
And frisks his pretty tail, and half unsheathes his claws!
Yet not the less, for modern lights unapt,
I trust the bolts and cross-bars of the laws
More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whisker'd jaws!

1825, or 1826.




ON DONNE'S POETRY


With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.

? 1818.




ON A BAD SINGER


Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
NE PLUS ULTRA


Sole Positive of Night!
Antipathist of Light!
Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod--
The one permitted opposite of God! --
Condensed blackness and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the Grasp enorm--
The Interceptor--
The Substance that still casts the shadow
Death! --
The Dragon foul and fell--
The unrevealable,
And hidden one, whose breath
Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell! --
Ah! sole despair
Of both the eternities in Heaven!
Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer,
The all-compassionate!
Save to the Lampads Seven
Reveal'd to none of all the Angelic State,
Save to the Lampads Seven,
That watch the throne of Heaven!

? 1826.




HUMAN LIFE

ON THE DENIAL OF IMMORTALITY


If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But _are_ their _whole_ of being! If the breath
Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,
If even a soul like Milton's can know death;
O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,
Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes!
Surplus of Nature's dread activity,
Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,
Retreating slow, with meditative pause,
She formed with restless hands unconsciously.