John Fane Dingle By Rumney Brook Shot a crop-eared owl, For pigeon mistook:
Caught her by the lax wing. --She, as she dies, Thrills his warm soul through With her deep eyes.
Corpse-eyes are eerie: Tiger-eyes fierce: John Fane Dingle found Owl-eyes worse.
Owl-eyes on night-clouds, Constant as Fate: Owl-eyes in baby's face: On dish and plate:
Owl-eyes, without sound. --Pale of hue John died of no complaint, With owl-eyes too.
Poets, painters, and puddings; these three Make up the World as it ought to be.
Poets make faces And sudden grimaces: They twit you, and spit you On words: then admit you To heaven or hell By the tales that they tell.
Painters are gay As young rabbits in May: They buy jolly mugs, Bowls, pictures, and jugs: The things round their necks Are lively with checks, (For they like something red As a frame for the head): Or they'll curse you with oaths, That tear holes in your clothes. (With nothing to mend them You'd best not offend them).
Puddings should be Full of currants, for me: Boiled in a pail, Tied in the tail Of an old bleached shirt: So hot that they hurt, So huge that they last From the dim, distant past Until the crack o' doom Lift the roof off the room.
Poets, painters, and puddings; these three Crown the day as it crowned should be.
Painting pictures Worth nothing at all In a dark cellar Sits Isaac Ball.
Cobwebs on his butter, Herrings in bed: Stout matted in the hair Of his poor cracked head.
There he paints Men's Thoughts --Or so says he: For in that cellar It's too dark to see.
Isaac knew great men, Poets and peers: Treated crown-princes To stouts and beers;
Some still visit him; Pretend to buy His unpainted pictures-- The Lord knows why.
His grey beard is woolly, Eyes brown and wild: Sticky things in his pocket For anybody's child.
Someday he'll win fame, --So Isaac boasts, Lecturing half the night To long-legged ghosts.
Isaac was young once: At sixty-five Still seduces more girls Than any man alive.
To those under smoke-blackened tiles, and cavernous echoing arches, In tortuous hid courts, where the roar never ceases Of deep cobbled streets wherein dray upon dray ever marches, The sky is a broken lid, a litter of smashed yellow pieces.
To those under mouldering roofs, where life to an hour is crowded, Life, to a span of the floor, to an inch of the light, And night is all fevrous-hot, a time to be bawded and rowdied, Day is a time of grinding, that looks for rest to the night.