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Recaptured Rhymes

Being a Batch of Political and Other Fugitives Arrested and Brought to Book. By H. D. Traill

Traill, H. D. (1842-1900)

POLITICAL VERSE

LAPUTA OUTDONE.

THE BARON DE WIGG.

BALLAD OF BALOONATICS CRANIOCRACS.

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POLITICAL VERSE

LAPUTA OUTDONE.

Oh, Philosopher crazed from the Island of Crazes,
Explored and depicted by Jonathan Swift,
Let us hear what your judgments on us and our ways is—
Permit us your mental impressions to sift.

For we have our follies of wisdom fantastic,
Some high-philosophic, political some,
And would fain ascertain, in no spirit sarcastic,
If you, my dear pundit, can match them at home.

When a man in Laputa falls sick unto danger,
Then is it the rule in that singular place
To throw up the window and ask the first stranger
To kindly come in and prescribe on the case?

When in legal perplexities, slighter or deeper,
For counsel in law a Laputan applies,
Does he seek the next crossing and beg of its sweeper,
When business is done, to step round and advise?

Are your pilots' certificates commonly given
To men who have not even looked on the seas?
Are your coachmen selected for not having driven?
Say, have you Laputans got customs like these?

You haven't? Then off with your bee-bearing bonnet,
Illustrious guest from Luggnaggian shores!
And down on your knee and do homage upon it
Profound to a State that is madder than yours!

For though we select not attorney, physician,
Or pilot who steers us, or coachman who drives,
From the ignorant crowd, who would gain erudition
At risk of our fortunes, our limbs, or our lives;

Yet this Ignorance dense that we do not let lead us
In private concerns, lest disaster befall,
This, that may not make wills for us, dose us, or bleed us
May rule us—the business that's hardest of all!

We say to It “Courage! Nay, go not so shyly!
In time you will master the work you are at;
Your country presents you her own corpus vile,
See, here is the commonweal, practise on that!

“Away with the notion (we echo in chorus)
Of power withheld until knowledge be gained,”
(Too long, cry the carts, have the horses before us
Unjust and unworthy precedence obtained!)

“The use of the scalpel in surgical functions
Will give you the skill of a surgeon professed,
And by much engine-driving at intricate junctions
One learns to drive engines along with the best.”

For is it not thus our political preachers
Discourse to us daily, in bidding us note
That “the franchise itself is the truest of teachers,”
That “voting instructs in the use of the vote”?

So, off with it! Off with your bee-bearing bonnet,
Illustrious guest from Luggnaggian shores!
And down on your knee, and do homage upon it
Profound to a State that is madder than yours!

THE BARON DE WIGG.

All ye who sit waiting in moody array,
Oppositionists eager to welcome a day
With the fate of the Ministry big,
Chastise your passion for power and place
By recalling the sad but instructive case
Of the fine old Baron de Wigg.

Old Baron de Wigg from his earliest years
Had moved in the highest official spheres,
Until he had learnt to dream
That “placemen” and “Wiggs” were convertible terms,
And belonged to a system of which the germs
Formed part of the cosmic scheme.

He considered the ends of creation gained
On the whole, while De Wiggs high office retained,
Fulfilment complete being won
When the head of the house was the realm's chief guide,
And each of the other De Wiggs supplied
With a post for a younger son.

Now imagine the Baron de Wigg's disgust
At finding the family suddenly thrust
From their natural place in the State
By men who from '32 down to that hour
Had never enjoyed a spell of power
Of more than the briefest date.

But as year after year kept slipping away,
To disgust there began a profound dismay
In the Baron's breast to succeed;
For, if longer excluded from place, he saw
That the uniform order of physical law
Could hardly be guaranteed.

This gloomy conviction inclined him to lend
Too willing an ear to a dubious friend
(Mr Latterday Radd was his name),
Who offered the Baron his counsel and aid
To regain what was worthy the prize to be made
Of a slightly unscrupulous game.

But Latterday Radd two acquaintances had,
Who rejoiced in the names of Crotchett and Fadd—
A quite unpresentable pair;
And the Baron, who could not afford to contemn
An alliance with Radd, thought mixing with them
To be—well, quite another affair.

So when in pure zeal for De Wigg and his ends,
Radd promised to drop his unsavoury friends
(To “sink” was the word he employed),
The Baron was touched by the simple young man
Who such loyalty showed to himself and his clan,
And accepted his aid overjoyed.

And all the De Wiggs were effusive in praise
Of the truly high-minded magnanimous ways
Of good Mr Latterday Radd,
And the disinterested effacement of self
With which their consent to be laid on the shelf
Had credited Crotchett and Fadd.

By the help of the friend enlisted so
(The while his associates shy “lay low,”
According to pledge and resolve)
The De Wiggs regained their official berth,
And the planets returned to their paths, and the earth
Began once more to revolve.

But his conquest of place was no sooner achieved
Than the Baron next day to his horror perceived—
Arm-linked with Latterday Radd—
That obtrusive old Crotchett pervading the place,
And behind them the pert and self-satisfied face
Of the still more odious Fadd.

De Wigg would have cut them and hurried away,
But Radd was before him, and hastened to say
In a coldly imperious tone:
“Permit me, dear Baron—(don't try to look big):
Mr Fadd, Mr Crotchett—the Baron de Wigg,
The friends of your friend are your own.”

On the Baron expressing in manner constrained
Surprise at their presence, his friend explained
That his pledge had been misunderstood;
For a time—and a purpose—he said, 'twas true,
He had promised to “sink” the obnoxious two,
But never to sink them for good.

De Wigg having risen they too must rise,
And he, as a friend, would the Baron advise
To be civil to Crotchett and Fadd;
So the Baron shook hands with a ghastly smile,
For he fully admitted the need, for a while,
Of, at least, being civil to Radd.

Thus lancés and thus influentially backed,
The pair to this wretched old party are tacked,
And declare, on advancement intent,
That he must introduce them without more ado
In both the great Houses he's access unto;
And the Baron will have to consent.

All ye, then, who sit in impatient array,
Oppositionists eager to welcome a day
With the fate of the Ministry big,
Chastise your passion for power and place
By recalling the sad but instructive case
Of the fine old Baron de Wigg.

BALLAD OF BALOONATICS CRANIOCRACS.

Of all the accomplished Professors who ever
From learning contrived common-sense to dissever—
Of all who delight, on a question of tongue,
To foment agitation the peoples among—
None goes with such thoroughness into the thing
As the erudite Slav whose proceedings I sing;
And whose name—if your jaws I may venture to tax—
Is Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs.

International law has his sovereign contempt;
From restraints of political prudence exempt,
He holds that when races for union clamour,
The question's but one of comparative grammar.

No “national movement,” whatever its fruits,
That starts from a real relation of roots,
The strenuous aid and encouragement lacks
Of the famous philologist, Craniocracs.

To many a cause of the “national” sort
The Professor has lent his enlightened support;
But of all his distinctions, his pride was to be a
High priest of the Pan-Macaronic Idea,
And first to have raised the Spaghettian claim
To inherit the true Macaronian name:
A position sustained against many attacks
By Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs.

The Spaghetts had been living in decent content, a
Race subject for centuries past to Polenta,
With liberties local and customs respected,
And lenient taxes with justice collected,

And ample permission their children to teach
That poetic and grandly cacophonous speech
Which first to their true nationality's tracks
Had directed Baloonatics Craniocracs.

But they, when he set their ethnology right,
With the free Macaronians burned to unite:
And the worthy Professor went round through their cities
Establishing Pan-Macaronic Committees,
Until they rebelled in a war to the knife,
And after two years of the bloodiest strife,
Forced haughty Polenta her grasp to relax,
To the joy of their champion Craniocracs.

From this struggle the rise of the Union dates
Of the Pan-Macaronic Confederate States,
Which, besides the Spaghetts, of a kindred as true
Raviolians counts and Lasagnians too.

But above them the Pateditalians claim
A supremacy, due to generical name;
And their claim the Professor unswervingly backs,
For philologist always is Craniocracs.

Are the freed populations content with their lot?
Well, candour compels me to say they are not.
Already the Union is deeply in debt
And taxed to the skin is the wretched Spaghett.
And the Pateditalians forbid him to teach
His poetic and grandly cacophonous speech,
On the ground that of modern corruption it smacks—
As is even admitted by Craniocracs.

But the worst of it is (if the murder must out),
The Professor's researches have led him to doubt
If his first ethnologic conclusions were sound,
Since he, as it seems, a new “factor” has found,

The “Vermicellenic,” so named from a race
Whose affinities throw a new light on the case;
Transforming, indeed, into whites all its blacks
To the mind of Baloonatics Craniocracs.

Through the Vermicellenes the Spaghett and his brother,
Are clearly of kin to Polenta and other
Great nations; and though they could only unite
By involving the world in a general fight,
The Professor, intrepid of logic as ever,
Will work day and night at that noble endeavour.
All hobbies are wild, but the wildest of hacks
Is bestrid by Baloonatics Craniocracs.

AN ENFANT TERRIBLE.

I.

The baby was born on a lowering morn
In Seventeen Eighty-and-Nine,
And poets and sages enacted the Mages
Who hailed the event divine.

Their “star in the west” had, it must be confessed,
A slightly sulphureous gleam;
But it faithfully led to the tumble-down shed,
At the sign of “The Old Régime.”

The adorers brought of the gold of Thought,
And the myrrh and frankincense of Song;
And they worshipped the birth that redeemed the earth
From the Old Dispensation of wrong.

With each other they vied for the pleasure and pride
Of preparing the Prince's crown,
And every one smiled on the infant mild
Till he kicked—and the house fell down.

II.

Then the poets and sages who acted as Mages
Went home to consider the scene,
And with serious looks sat them down to their books
To resolve what this portent should mean.

And when they had found upon reasoning sound
What the strange new thing must be,
They compared their notes, and collected the votes,
And it seemed that they couldn't agree.

Some courageously said a mistake had been made,
That the good they had worshipped was evil,
Their Saviour supposed, by his conduct disclosed
For an obvious limb of the Devil.

But others demurred to this view, and preferred
A conclusion less humbling to pride,
And admitting the child to be wayward and wild,
His Satanic extraction denied.

'Twas (they said) premature to affect to be sure
How a babe later on will behave,
And for all that the boy had begun to destroy,
It might well be his mission to save.

III.

But to common surprise, while disputed the wise,
Was the infant inspired or mad,
To boyhood 'twas reared, and it shortly appeared
That the world was too small for the lad.

He had got him a blade at Ajaccio made,
And had picked up a song at Marseilles,
And had rigged up a flag from a three-coloured rag
He had fixed to its staff—with nails.

A bonnet of red he had cocked on his head,
Steel-bright were his eyes, and wild;
Unkempt was his hair, and his legs were bare—
A truly unusual child!

IV.

So sallied he forth, East, South, and North,
To the barren lands and the fair;
To the South in its glows, to the North in its snows,
To the East in its desert-glare.

To the Elbe, to the Rhine, through the plumed Apennine,
Over Italy's plains he hastes;
Then Eastward far—till his conquering star
Grew dim on the Syrian wastes:

To the shores of the Nile; to the Knights' old isle;
Then again by the pierced Pyrenees,
South, south, ever south, to the Mid-sea's mouth,
At the Pillars of Hercules.

East, North, and South, as a flood to its mouth
Bears trees of the forest uptorn,
On the towering crest of the wave in his breast
Was the terrible urchin borne.

With the spilth of his hands he slaked the sands
Athirst of Egyptian suns;
He scarred the scalp of the frozen Alp
With the wheels of his clambering guns.

Sank hearts of kings when rustled the wings
Of his eagles about their ears;
At his cannon-knell old empires fell,
And thrones of a thousand years.

All wisdom of time, all strength of prime,
At the foot of this stripling crude,
With his head in a blaze of its single craze,
Lay stupefied, spent, subdued!

V.

And the doctors? Well, if the truth be to tell,
Even some in opinion stout,
Who had clung to the creed that the child was indeed
A Messiah, began to doubt.

But the sturdiest ones still stuck to their guns,
And maintained his legation divine;
“Not peace, but a sword,” was the scriptural word,
From which he had taken his line.

Then the kings he o'erthrew had had only their due,
And might even a punishment worse
Have deservedly got for a certain vile plot,
To strangle the baby at nurse.

VI.

Thus the doctors cried; but the world outside,
That life, not books, understands—
The Great Commonplace—had already the case
Withdrawn from the doctors' hands.

To the men of the field and the mart was revealed,
Through a mist of conceptions vague,
One truth, clear as light, that, cost what it might,
They must promptly abate this plague.

So the nations clubbed, that the boy might be drubbed;
While he, with unwavering mind,
Stood, a new Athanase—would the whole world face
For a creed—of a different kind.

He fought hard and hot, and with varying lot,
And with hopes now high, now low,
Till a certain forenoon, in the month of June,
When he closed with his strongest foe.

They closed, and the shock made Europe to rock,
And the pulse of her heart to stay,
While the wrestlers gasped, in their death-grip clasped,
For all one breathless day.

But his glass was run; sank, sank with the sun
The line of its lessening sand,
And as night came down he was prostrate thrown,
And the great sword torn from his hand.

This, safe under lock, on a sea-girt rock
They hid; and it six years lay
Condemned to rust in the island dust,
Till it rusted its heart away.

While as for the boy who had wrought such annoy
To the world in his youthful fling,
Of his ways to repent, straight home he was sent
In charge of a Christian King.

They tore down his rag of a tricolor flag,
And they gave him a banner instead,
Of a beautiful white, with lilies bedight,
And gold for the blue and the red.

They put him to school of the good priests' rule,
To atone by penance and praise
And prostration of soul for his Carmagnole,
And mass for his Marseillaise.

VII.

In this excellent way (so the doctors say)
Was the scapegrace led to reform;
And a grave middle age, respected and sage,
Has succeeded his youth of storm.

And (excepting, perhaps, one unlucky relapse
From his later regenerate state,
Into juvenile ways on the great Three Days,
And another in 'forty-eight,

And a third—worst far—at the end of the War)
He has yearly become more staid;
More and more like that other, his English brother,
Who's fat, and has taken to trade.

And though, here and there, some devil-may-care
Of a Russ or a Bursch by the Spree
May claim him as kin, they will shortly begin
Oats sown, to reform, just as he.

VIII.

Thus the doctors declare with their confident air;
But many there be who avow
That, for all they have seen of thy altered mien,
O Democracy, dread art thou!

If their fancy essay thy form to portray,
In the vision that faces them then,
No shape they behold of the stature and mould
Of a man among mortal men.

But rather in thought is thy emblem wrought
Mysterious, formless, vast;
A giant of stone on a giant throne,
Like the gods of the long-buried past.

Yet about thy feet light chatterers meet,
Politician and pamphleteer,
And they learnedly prose on the form of thy toes
Or the toe which may chance to be near.

Not caring to raise their complacent gaze
So high that a glance may fall
On the hands laid at ease o'er the monstrous knees—
Those hands which could cover us all!

Not caring to trace on the stone-hewn face,
With its distance-questioning eyes,
That inscrutable smile of the Head by the Nile
That is dumb till the sun shall rise.

When its first rays smite, what chord of affright
Will it sound for the world's new song?
What ground-tone of fear?—Who lives, he shall hear:
May he not have lived too long!

THE REGION OF DREAM.

In a legend of old 'tis recorded for us
That the air and the sea and the land
To the children of man were distributed thus
By Zeus his apportioning hand:

He appointed the land for the Workers to share,
And the sea for the Poet to roam,
But assigned in his wisdom the vacuous air
For the Higher Philosopher's home.

“Go wander,” said Zeus to this last (we were taught),
“Where alone there is room for your schemes,
In a region as wide as the reach of your thought,
And as lofty—and void—as your dreams.

“Here is food for your mind, for your body a feast
Of the which never dearth can befall,
Ay, a plenty of nourishing wind from the East
To fill you your belly withal.

“From the clouds you may gather your theory-stuff,
Definitions from tracks of the birds,
Here are mists in abundance and more than enough
For becomingly clothing your words.

“Here perform at your leisure the feats that you love
Unrestrained by conditions of place,
And leap from the plane where your premisses move
To conclusions in Infinite Space.

“I will give you, to deck your magnificent views,
The run of the rainbow-span,
And allow you the pick of the sunset hues
To adorn your ‘Future-of-Man,’”

Thus Zeus, in the legend, ordained it, and hence
Mankind have been wont to declare
Of all Theory freed from the trammels of sense,
That its natural home is the air.

But now would you know the Chimera's abode,
And the kingdom of Folly Supreme?
Would you seek, in these days, to discover the road
To the genuine region of dream?

It is not in the vacuous air, it is not
In the wandering clouds, wind-blown.
The region of dream is the three-acre plot
Where an Irishman's “praties” are sown.

It is here where the eye philosophic detects
The suspension of natural laws;
Where causes omit to engender effects
And effects can dispense with a cause.

It is here where the marvels of magical spell
Medieval find credit once more,
And “peasant-proprietor” conjures as well
As an “Abracadabra” of yore.

It is here, it is here, on the Irishman's farm
Where alchemic economists hold
That to utter the “peasant-proprietor” charm
Transmutes the base metals to gold,

That by force of this sorcery Waste becomes Thrift
And energy springs out of Sloth,
That the burden of Need reappears as a gift
And exhaustion of soil as a growth.

Ah! bodiless, limitless regions of space!
What dream have you brought to the birth
So fantastic as this whose nativity-place
Is the solid, dull, definite earth?