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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=580193" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>To Moliere</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Unequaled genius, whose warm fancy knows<br>No rhyming labor, no poetic throes;<br>To whom Apollo has unlocked his store;<br>Whose coin is struck from pure Parnassian ore;<br>Thou, dextrous master, teach thy skill to me,<br>And tell me, Moliere, how to1 rhyme like thee!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You never falter when the close comes round,<br>Or leave the substance to preserve the sound;<br>You never wander after words that fly,<br>For all the words you need before you lie.<br>But I, who--smarting for my sins of late--<br>With itch of rhyme am visited by fate,<br>Expend on air my unavailing force,<br>And, hunting sounds, am sweated like a horse.<br>In vain I often muse from dawn till night:<br>When I mean black, my stubborn verse says white;<br>If I should paint a coxcomb's flippant mien,<br>I scarcely can forbear to name the Dean;<br>If asked to tell the strains that purest flow,<br>My heart says Virgil, but my pen Quinault;<br>In short, whatever I attempt to say,<br>Mischance conducts me quite the other way.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At times, fatigued and fretted with the pain,<br>When every effort for relief is vain,<br>The fruitless chase I peevishly give o'er,<br>And swear a thousand times to write no more:<br>But, after thousand vows, perhaps by chance,<br>Before my careless eyes the couplets dance.<br>Then with new force my flame bursts out again,<br>Pleased I resume the paper and the pen;<br>And, all my anger and my oaths forgot,<br>I calmly muse and resolutely blot.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet, if my eager hand, in haste to rhyme,<br>Should tack an empty couplet at a time,<br>Great names who do the same I might adduce;<br>Nay, some who keep such hirelings for their use.<br>Need blooming Phyllis be described in prose<br>By any lover who has seen a _rose?_<br>Who can forget heaven's masterpiece, her eye,<br>Where, within call, the Loves and Graces lie?<br>Who can forget her smile, devoid of art,<br>Her heavenly sweetness and her frozen heart?<br>How easy thus forever to compound,<br>And ring new changes on recurring sound;<br>How easy, with a reasonable store<br>Of useful epithets repeated o'er,<br>Verb, substantive, and pronoun, to transpose,<br>And into tinkling metre hitch dull prose.<br>But I--who tremble o'er each word I use,<br>And all that do not aid the sense refuse,<br>Who cannot bear those phrases out of place<br>Which rhymers stuff into a vacant space--Ponder<br>my scrupulous verses o'er and o'er,<br>And when I write five words, oft blot out four.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Plague on the fool who taught us to confine<br>The swelling thought within a measured line;<br>Who first in narrow thraldom fancy pent,<br>And chained in rhyme each pinioned sentiment.<br>Without this toil, contentment's soothing balm<br>Might lull my languid soul in listless calm:<br>Like the smooth prebend how might I recline,<br>And loiter life in mirth and song and wine!<br>Roused by no labor, with no care opprest,<br>Pass all my nights in sleep, my days in rest.<br>My passions and desires obey the rein;<br>No mad ambition fires my temperate vein;<br>The schemes of busy greatness I decline,<br>Nor kneel in palaces at Fortune's shrine.<br>In short, my life had been supremely blest<br>If envious rhyme had not disturbed my rest:<br>But since this freakish fiend began to roll<br>His idle vapors o'er my troubled soul,<br>Since first I longed in polished verse to please,<br>And wrote with labor to be read with ease,<br>Nailed to my chair, day after day I pore<br>On what I write and what I wrote before;<br>Retouch each line, each epithet review,<br>Or burn the paper and begin anew.<br>While thus my labors lengthen into years,<br>I envy all the race of sonneteers.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Hail, happy Scudere! whose prolific brain<br>Brings forth a monthly volume without pain;<br>What though thy works, offending every rule,<br>Proclaim their author an insipid fool;<br>Still have they found, whate'er the critic says,<br>Traders to buy and emptier fools to praise.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And, truly, if in rhymes the couplets close,<br>What should it matter that the rest is prose?<br>Who stickles now for antiquated saws,<br>Or cramps his verses with pedantic laws?<br>The fool can welcome every word he meets,<br>With placid joy contemplating his feats;<br>And while each stanza swells his wondering breast<br>Admires them all, yet thinks the last the best.<br>But towering Genius, hopeless to attain<br>That unknown summit which he pants to gain,<br>Displeased himself, enchanting all beside,<br>Scorns each past effort that his strength supplied,<br>And filling every reader with delight,<br>Repents the hour when he began to write.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To you, who know how justly I complain,<br>To you I turn for medicine to my pain!<br>Grant me your talent, and impart your store,<br>Or teach me, Moliere, how to rhyme no more.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Nicholas+Boileau-Despreaux">Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=580193" data-title="To Moliere de Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux" data-description="Unequaled genius, whose warm fancy knows
No rhyming labor, no poetic throes;
To whom Apollo has unlocked his store;
Whose coin is struck from pure Parnassian ore;
Thou, dextrous master, teach thy skill to me,
And tell me, Moliere, how to1 rhyme li..."></div>
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