A Ballad of Old Metres
When, in the merry realm of France,
Bluff Francis ruled and loved and laughed,
Now held the lists with knightly lance,
Anon the knightly beaker quaffed;
Where wit could wing his keenest shaft
With Villon’s verse or Montaigne’s prose,
Then poets exercised their craft
In ballades, triolets, rondeaux.
O quaint old times! O fitting chants!
With fluttering banners fore and aft,
With mirth of minstrelsy and dance,
Sped Poesy’s enchanted craft;
The odorous gale was blowing abaft
Her silken sails, as on she goes,
Doth still to us faint echoes waft
Of ballades, triolets, rondeaux.
But tell me with what countenance
Ye seek on modern rhymes to graft
Those tender shoots of old Romance-
Romance that now is only chaffed?
O iron days! O idle raft
Of rhymesters! they are ‘peu de chose,’
What Scott would call supremely “saft”
Your ballades, triolets, rondeaux.
Envoy.
Bards, in whose vein the maddening draught
Of Hippocrene so wildly glows,
Forbear, and do not drive us daft
With ballades, triolets, rondeaux.
The Century.