Fables in Song :: :: University of Virginia Library

A hen, whom the bounty of Providence made
A parent prolific, with motherly pride
Every day a fresh egg in the henroost laid,
Which to hatch into life she then patiently tried.
But, whilst on those eggs she was brooding warm
In a placid glow of parental pleasure,
Chill was the change as she spied with alarm
A Weasel, who watch'd her, aware of her treasure.
And this Hen henceforth was so haunted by
The chilly charm of that Weasel's eye,
That, night by night, in her dreaming sleep
It was ever the self-same dream she dream'd;
How, changed to a Weasel, she crept in the deep
Of the dark to the henroost; and, stealthily seem'd
With the craft of a Weasel to suck and destroy
Those eggs that, by day, were the poor fowl's joy.

2.

This double identity, made up of two—
Her waking and sleeping self—at last
The Hen's life into confusion threw,
And over it, daily and nightly, cast
The spell of a twofold trouble. By day
She lived in such dread of her midnight dream
That at length not an egg was she able to lay:
Yet this daily sterility did not redeem
From its nightly plague her spirit tormented,
When she, by the dream's transforming power,
Changed into a Weasel, was discontented
At finding no more any eggs to devour.

3.

“Ah, had I,” she sigh'd, “but the gift to forget,
I might hope to recapture lost happiness yet!
Then, by day, with a spirit unvext should I
Taste the soothing sweets of maternity,
Whilst the ravisher's raptures of cruel delight
Would be mine, with young victims to ruin, by night.
But alas! as it is, I can neither enjoy
The rude libertine's lust, nor the love of the mother;
Who, combining two selves that each other destroy,
Fail to realise either the one or the other!”

MORAL.

So are we: who, both author and critic in one,
Miss the comfort accorded to either alone.
By alternate creative and critical powers
Is our suffering identity sunder'd and torn:
And the tooth of the critic that's in us devours
Half the author's conceptions before they are born.