 | Edward Cracroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems
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LXXXIV
A POETASTER
Of common things I treat in scanty rhymes,
My verse is wrung from life's familiar prose,
I hardly guess if Hippocrene still flows,
'Tis not my wit that Helicon sublimes.
Like that rude peasant-lad of mythic times,
I press my beanstalk with illiterate toes,
Not envious of the learnèd wight who knows
A lordlier stair perchance,—and never climbs.
Or change the trope; my lines are coined of stuff
That lay where no Scamander richly rolled.
From native soil, obscure, unvalued, rough,
I dig the metal for my sonnet-mould.
It melts, it runs, it sparkles—'tis enough!
Men call it copper: well, I dream it gold.
| Edward Cracroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems
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