“How shall I be a poet?

How shall I write in rhyme?

You told me once ‘the very wish

Partook of the sublime.’

Then tell me how! Don’t put me off

With your ‘another time’!”

The old man smiled to see him,

To hear his sudden sally;

He liked the lad to speak his mind

Enthusiastically;

And thought “There’s no hum-drum in him,

Nor any shilly-shally.”

“And would you be a poet

Before you’ve been to school?

Ah, well! I hardly thought you

So absolute a fool.

First learn to be spasmodic —

A very simple rule.

“For first you write a sentence,

And then you chop it small;

Then mix the bits, and sort them out

Just as they chance to fall:

The order of the phrases makes

No difference at all.

‘Then, if you’d be impressive,

Remember what I say,

That abstract qualities begin

With capitals alway:

The True, the Good, the Beautiful —

Those are the things that pay!

“Next, when you are describing

A shape, or sound, or tint;

Don’t state the matter plainly,

But put it in a hint;

And learn to look at all things

With a sort of mental squint.”

“For instance, if I wished, Sir,

Of mutton-pies to tell,

Should I say ‘dreams of fleecy flocks

Pent in a wheaten cell’?”

“Why, yes,” the old man said: “that phrase

Would answer very well.

“Then fourthly, there are epithets

That suit with any word —

As well as Harvey’s Reading Sauce

With fish, or flesh, or bird —

Of these, ‘wild,’ ‘lonely,’ ‘weary,’ ‘strange,’

Are much to be preferred.”

“And will it do, O will it do

To take them in a lump —

As ‘the wild man went his weary way

To a strange and lonely pump’?”

&............