Charades
My first is followed by a bird,
My second’s met by plasters,
My whole’s more shunned, but less absurd
Than prigs or poetasters;
’Tis also a symbolic word
For architects’ disasters.
My first, invisible as air,
Apportions things of earth by line and square,
The soul of pathos, eloquence, and wit,
My second shows each passion’s changeful fit.
My whole, though motionless, declares
In many ways how everybody fares.
The Reverend Hildebrand Pusey de Vere,
Whose living was worth some two thousand a year,
Was a pattern of parsons—wrote rhythmical flummery
Far better than Gaber, or Keble, or Gomery;
His parishioners all might be Brahmins or Hindoos,
If they’d only subscribe for stained glass in the windows.
But of all his offences perhaps this was the worst,
He entered the lectern arrayed in my first.
His brother, Sir Arthur, a careless M. P.,
Was a man about town full of frolic and glee.
His creed was my second—good Hildebrand’s homilies,
He thought dry and dusty, and full of anomalies;
Well loved he clear music of foxhound and horn
When the Autumn sun rose on brown uplands of Quorn.
He never drank wine of inferior quality,
And he lived in my whole with a great deal of jollity.
Mortimer Collins.