An Elegy Upon The Death Of The Dean Of St. Paul's, Dr. John
Can we not force from widow'd poetry, / Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy / To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust, / Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust, / Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower / Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour, / Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay / Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day? / Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense / Through all our language, both the words and sense? / 'Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain / And sober Christian precepts still retain, / Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame, / Grave homilies and lectures, but the flame / Of thy brave soul (that shot such heat and light / As burnt our earth and made our darkness bright, / Committed holy rapes upon our will, / Did through the eye the melting heart distil, / And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach / As sense might judge what fancy could not reach) / Must be desir'd forever. So the fire / That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic quire, / Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath, / Glow'd here a while, lies quench'd now in thy death. / The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds / O'erspread, was purg'd by thee; the lazy seeds / Of servile imitation thrown away, / And fresh invention planted; thou didst pay / The debts of our penurious bankrupt age; / Licentious thefts, that make poetic rage / A mimic fury, when our souls must be / Possess'd, or with Anacreon's ecstasy, / Or Pindar's, not their own; the subtle cheat / Of sly exchanges, and the juggling feat / Of two-edg'd words, or whatsoever wrong / By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue, / Thou hast redeem'd, and open'd us a mine / Of rich and pregnant fancy; drawn a line / Of masculine expression, which had good / Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood / Our superstitious fools admire, and hold / Their lead more precious than thy burnish'd gold, / Thou hadst been their exchequer, and no more / They each in other's dust had rak'd for ore. / Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time, / And the blind fate of language, whose tun'd chime / More charms the outward sense; yet thou mayst claim / From so great disadvantage greater fame, / Since to the awe of thy imperious wit / Our stubborn language bends, made only fit / With her tough thick-ribb'd hoops to gird about / Thy giant fancy, which had prov'd too stout / For their soft melting phrases. As in time / They had the start, so did they cull the prime / Buds of invention many a hundred year, / And left the rifled fields, besides the fear / To touch their harvest; yet from those bare lands / Of what is purely thine, thy only hands, / (And that thy smallest work) have gleaned more / Than all those times and tongues could reap before. / But thou art gone, and thy strict laws will be / Too hard for libertines in poetry; / They will repeal the goodly exil'd train / Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign / Were banish'd nobler poems; now with these, / The silenc'd tales o' th' Metamorphoses / Shall stuff their lines, and swell the windy page, / Till verse, refin'd by thee, in this last age / Turn ballad rhyme, or those old idols be / Ador'd again, with new apostasy. / Oh, pardon me, that break with untun'd verse / The reverend silence that attends thy hearse, / Whose awful solemn murmurs were to thee, / More than these faint lines, a loud elegy, / That did proclaim in a dumb eloquence / The death of all the arts; whose influence, / Grown feeble, in these panting numbers lies, / Gasping short-winded accents, and so dies. / So doth the swiftly turning wheel not stand / In th' instant we withdraw the moving hand, / But some small time maintain a faint weak course, / By virtue of the first impulsive force; / And so, whilst I cast on thy funeral pile / Thy crown of bays, oh, let it crack awhile, / And spit disdain, till the devouring flashes / Suck all the moisture up, then turn to ashes. / I will not draw the envy to engross / All thy perfections, or weep all our loss; / Those are too numerous for an elegy, / And this too great to be express'd by me. / Though every pen should share a distinct part, / Yet art thou theme enough to tire all art; / Let others carve the rest, it shall suffice / I on thy tomb this epitaph incise: / Here lies a king, that rul'd as he thought fit / The universal monarchy of wit; / Here lie two flamens, and both those, the best, / Apollo's first, at last, the true God's priest.