Yes, write if you want to--there's nothing like trying; Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold? I'll show you that rhyming's as easy as lying, If you'll listen to me while the art I unfold.
Here's a book full of words: one can choose as he fancies, As a painter his tint, as a workman his tool; Just think! all the poems and plays and romances Were drawn out of this, like the fish from a pool!
You can wander at will through its syllabled mazes, And take all you want--not a copper they cost; What is there to hinder your picking out phrases For an epic as clever as "Paradise Lost"?
Don't mind if the index of sense is at zero; Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean; Leander and Lillian and Lillibullero Are much the same thing in the rhyming machine.
There are words so delicious their sweetness will smother That boarding-school flavour of which we're afraid; There is "lush" is a good one and "swirl" is another; Put both in one stanza, its fortune is made.
With musical murmurs and rhythmical closes You can cheat us of smiles when you've nothing to tell; You hand us a nosegay of milliner's roses, And we cry with delight, "Oh, how sweet they do smell!"
Perhaps you will answer all needful conditions For winning the laurels to which you aspire, By docking the tails of the two prepositions I' the style o' the bards you so greatly admire.
As for subjects of verse, they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great basket with bushels of rhymes.
Let me show you a picture--'tis far from irrelevant-- By a famous old hand in the arts of design; 'Tis only a photographed sketch of an elephant; The name of the draughtsman was Rembrandt of Rhine.
How easy! no troublesome colours to lay on; It can't have fatigued him, no, not in the least; A dash here and there with a haphazard crayon, And there stands the wrinkled-skinned, baggy-limbed beast.
Just so with your verse--'tis as easy as sketching; You can reel off a song without knitting your brow, As lightly as Rembrandt a drawing or etching; It is nothing at all, if you only know how.
Well, imagine you've printed your volume of verses; Your forehead is wreathed with the garland of fame; Your poem the eloquent school-boy rehearses; Her album the school-girl presents for your name.