The Book of Ballads, edited by Bon Gaultier [pseud.]Martin, Theodore, Sir
General
The Book of Ballads, edited by Bon Gaultier [pseud.]
Martin, Theodore, Sir
Parodies
"Bravo, Smifzer! This is the right sort of thing--no wishy-washy
snivelling about a wounded heart and all that kind of stuff, but
savage sarcasm, the lava of a volcanic spirit. In a fine prophetic
strain is that vision of Amy's feelings as the inebriated nawab
stumbles hazily into the drawing-room, steaming fulsomely of chilma!
And that picture of the African jungle, with Smifzer _in puris_
mounted on a high-trotting giraffe, with his twelve dusky brides
around him,--Cruikshank alone could do it justice. But the triumph
of the poem is in the high-toned sentiment of civilisation and moral
duty, which, esteeming 'the grey barbarian' lower than the 'Christian
cad,'--and that is low enough in all conscience,--tears the
captivating delusions of freedom and polygamy from the poet's eyes,
even when his pulse is throbbing at the wildest, and sends him from
the shades of the palm and the orange tree to the advertising columns
of the 'Morning Post.' This is indeed a great poem, and we need only
add that the reader will find something like it in Mr Alfred
Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall.' There has been pilfering somewhere; but
Messieurs Smifzer and Tennyson must settle it between them."
How little did I dream, when writing this, that I should hear the parody
quoted through the years up till now almost as often as the original
poem! Smifzer was wiser than Tennyson, for he never spoiled the effect
of his poem by admitting, like Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall, Sixty
Years After," that it was a good thing that "spider-hearted" Amy threw
him over as she did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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