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Collected poems

By Austin Dobson: Ninth edition
  

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438

TO ONE WHO BIDS ME SING

This piece was written in response to a graceful expostulatory villanelle which appeared in Temple Bar for February 1895, and was signed “Cecil Harley.”

“The straw is too old to make pipes of.” —Don Quixote.

You ask a “many-winter'd” Bard
Where hides his old vocation?
I'll give—the answer is not hard—
A classic explanation.
“Immortal” though he be, he still,
Tithonus-like, grows older,
While she, his Muse of Pindus Hill,
Still bares a youthful shoulder.
Could that too-sprightly Nymph but leave
Her ageless grace and beauty,
They might, betwixt them both, achieve
A hymn de Senectute;
But She—She can't grow gray; and so,
Her slave, whose hairs are falling,
Must e'en his Doric flute forego,
And seek some graver calling,—
Not ill-content to stand aside,
To yield to minstrels fitter
His singing-robes, his singing-pride,
His fancies sweet—and bitter!