The Muse's Warning
To all artists.
And especialy every author of "verse libre".
Madness makes not a monarch, Nor crassitude a crown. If you would hike my mount's heights Or dive my depths, nor drown. If you would laud yourself the laurels, Dub yourself to Dryden's throne, Know still for all your ego's quarrels, Higher still sits Three alone. And every master's mount beneath them, Peaks reach not near half way high And those are pinnacles of power Such as do blot out the sky. Shakespeare, Kipling, Frost, and Wordsworth, Bryon, Tennyson, Emerson, Poe, Keats, Yeats, Pushkin, Donne, the Shelleys Blake, the Brownings, Longfellow, Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Hardy Jonson, Virgil, Burns and Cædmon, Skelton, Taliesin, Ovid, Coleridge, Hopkins, Spenser, Petrarch, Milton, Pope and Butler, Swineburne, Villon Moore, Goethe, Hugo, Juvenal, Rilke, Tolkien, Sturluson, Swift, —Forever's swift to count them all. Each one of these is more the master Then you on your leveled hill, Each owns a treasure house who's measure, You could never hope to fill. So fight the passes, drunk or sober Frost and sleet and blinding snow, Dig your mountain up and over, Those who still before you go. Newton stood on giant's shoulders, You've titans to step among, Tesla caught the wit of lightning, Lightning's wit bears you along. But in all your airy lofting, Up of brains amongst the sky, Keep your feet on grounded wisdom, Lest your head too large and high Let the sun addle it, maddened Spin you to the sea to die. Mind too, that when you are delving, Whether in the stone or sea, That the long lived mine-or-diver, Must twice as prepared be. Lest you wake an ancient monster, Beast of shadow, whip, and flame, Or some slimy thing who's mother, Slept ere Adam gave a name. Worse, these being in the shadow Of the mind are fought in thought, And if you are so fell-foolhardy, They will rein your works to rot. You will start taping banannas, To the walls inside your brain, Multitoned Marilyn Monroes, In their quartets, raising cain. Cubes and tubes and splashing colors, Nudity and gushing gorn, Dipping random things in horsepiss, Eating shit and crapping porn. Hell is never other people, It's a place you make yourself, Watch it, lest your pride at swimming Sends you diving off a shelf. Know yourself and know your battle, Know your weapons, paint or pen, Pipe and chisel, knife and fiddle, Learn you all the rules again. Emulate the ancient masters, Rest on their foundations sure, Learn the words and learn the meter, Learn the forms and learn them pure. Then you may start in on mixing, Virtues of a foreign tongue, Translate others, add your own flair, (Easier when you are young.) Rules are oughtn't to be broken, Think back as a child, then, You weren't to touch the stove, now, You knew how, and what, and when. Seeking wonder, remain humble, You should make yourself a foo-- Even only once a season, Laughter is pupil and school. Wander smaller than an ant, then, You will find the pond as wide, That the mightiest Leviathan Could as a guppy bide. You will find your yard a forest, You will find your lampposts fay, You are Jack, go slay the giant Ulysses in Odysseus' way. After that, the supposed prison, Bounding you becomes a fence, Since you've herded up your fancies, You may wander here and hence.
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