Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry.
Volume VII. Descriptive: Narrative. 1904. | | | | Descriptive Poems: I. Personal: Great Writers | | Lowell on Himself | | James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) |
| | From “A Fable for Critics”
THERE is Lowell, who ’s striving Parnassus to climb | |
| With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme. | |
| He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, | |
| But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders. | |
| The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching | 5 |
| Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching; | |
| His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, | |
| But he ’d rather by half make a drum of the shell, | |
| And rattle away till he ’s old as Methusalem, | |
| At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem. | 10 | | | |
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