This is liable to be the last of these for a while: another almost-wholly-unknown literary satire, although this one is a little better than most of them:
Poor Coleridge! his is no affected rant,
He lives on opium, and he studies Kant;
Not over clear at first, what mortal brain
Opium and Kant together could sustain?
He sung, O Cristabelle, in all his glory,
Thy "singularly wild and beauteous story;"
Which what it means, and what it is about,
No commentator ever has made out:
He had the night-mare, dreamed of Kubla-Khan,
Then plunged into the Metropolitan:
He mounted next the tub, and long and loud
Poured his lay sermons o'er the astonished crowd:
And last, when opium's frantic transport fails,
And Kant thy gentler influence prevails,
Through the wide town advertisements are spread-
The poet lectures at a crown a-head.
[Charles Hughes Terrot, Common Sense: A Poem (1819), 8-9]
]
I also like his reference, on p.1, to Keats. Terror assures the reader that s/he will find in the volume 'Plain common sense, but no ecstatic feats,/And rhymes at least as good as Mister Keates' and adds a footnote explaining the reference:
Mr. John Keates, the muse's child of promise, is a rising poet of the Cockney School; who, if he had but an ear for rhyme, a little knowledge of grammar, and sufficient intellect to distinguish sense from nonsense, might perhaps do very well.
Hmm. What did happens to Mister Keates, I wonder?
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