POET, beware! The sonnet’s primrose path
Is all too tempting for thy feet to tread.
Not on this journey shalt thou earn thy bread,
Because the sated reader roars in wrath:
‘Little indeed to say the singer hath,
And little sense in all that he hath said;
Such rhymes are lightly writ but hardly read,
And naught but stubble is his aftermath!’
Then shall he cast that bonny book of thine
Where the extreme waste-paper basket gapes,
There shall thy futile fancies peak and pine,
With other minor poets, pallid shapes,
Who come a long way short of the divine,
Tormented souls of imitative apes.