Familiar Faces

Familiar Faces
Harry Graham

Graham Harry

Familiar Faces

THE CRY OF THE PUBLISHER

O my Author, do you hear the Autumn calling?
Does its message fail to reach you in your den,
Where the ink that once so sluggishly was crawling
Courses swiftly through your stylographic pen?
'Tis the season when the editor grows active,
When the office-boy looks longingly to you.
Won't you give him something novel and attractive
To review?

Never mind if you are frivolous or solemn,
If you only can be striking and unique,
The reviewers will concede you half a column
In their literary journals, any week.
And 'twill always be your publisher's ambition
To provide for the demand that you create,
And dispose of a gigantic first edition,
While you wait.

O my Author, can't you pull yourself together,
Try to expiate the failures of the past,
And just ask yourself dispassionately whether
You can't give us something better than your last?
If you really – if you truly – are a poet,
As you fancy – pray forgive my being terse —
Don't you think you might occasionally show it
In your verse?

THE CRY OF THE AUTHOR

O my Publisher, how dreadfully you bore me!
Of your censure I am frankly growing tired.
With your diatribes eternally before me,
How on earth can I expect to feel inspired?
You are orderly, no doubt, and systematic,
In that office where recumbent you recline;
You would modify your methods in an attic
Such as mine.

If you lived a sort of hand-to-mouth existence
(Where the mouth found less employment than the hand);
If your rhymes would lend your humour no assistance,
And your wit assumed a form that never scann'd;
If you sat and waited vainly at your table
While Calliope declined to give her cues,
You would realise how very far from stable
Was the Mews!

You would find it quite impossible to labour
With the patient perseverance of a drone,
While some tactless but enthusiastic neighbour
Played a cake walk on a wheezy gramophone,
While your peace was so disturbed by constant clatter,
That at length you grew accustomed – nay, resigned,
To the never-ending victory of Matter
Over Mind.

While you batten upon plovers' eggs and claret,
In the shelter of some fashionable club,
I am starving, very likely, in a garret,
Off the street so incorrectly labelled Grub,
Where the vintage smacks distinctly of the ink-butt,
And the atmosphere is redolent of toil,
And there's nothing for the journalist to drink but
Midnight oil!

It is useless to solicit inspiration
When one isn't in the true poetic mood,
When one contemplates the prospect of starvation,
And one's little ones are clamouring for food.
When one's tongue remains ingloriously tacit,
One is forced with some reluctance to admit
That, alas! (as Virgil said) Poeta nascit-
-Ur, non fit!

Then, my Publisher, be gentle with your poet;
Do not treat him with the harshness he deserves,
For, in fact, altho' you little seem to know it,
You are gradually getting on his nerves.
Kindly dam the foaming torrent of your curses,
While I ask you, – yes, and pause for a reply, —
Are you writing this immortal book of verses,
Or am I?

I

THE FUMBLER

Gentle Reader, charge your tumbler
With anæmic lemonade!
Let us toast our fellow-fumbler,
Who was surely born, not made.