One is incisive, corrosive--
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant--
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive--
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant--
Five ... O Danaides, O Sieve!
Now, they ply axes and crowbars--
Now they prick pins at a tissue
Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's
Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue?
Where is our gain at the Two-bars?
_Est fuga, volvitur rota!_
On we drift. Where looms the dim port?
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota--
Something is gained, if one caught but the import--
Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha!
What [with] affirming, denying,
Holding, risposting, subjoining,
All's like ... it's like ... for an instance I'm trying ...
There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining
Under those spider-webs lying?
So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims--"But where's music, the dickens?
Blot ye the gold, while your spider-web strengthens,
Blacked to the stoutest of tickens?"
Do our readers exclaim, "But where's poetry--the dickens--in all this
rigmarole?" We confess we can find none--we can find nothing but a set
purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of
Hudibrastic rhyme.
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