Against the Hard to Suit by Jean de La Fontaine

Were I a pet of fair Calliope, / I would devote the gifts conferr'd on me / To dress in verse old Aesop's lies divine; / For verse, and they, and truth, do well combine; / But, not a favourite on the Muses' hill, / I dare not arrogate the magic skill, / To ornament these charming stories. / A bard might brighten up their glories, / No doubt. I try, -- what one more wise must do. / Thus much I have accomplish'd hitherto: -- / By help of my translation, / The beasts hold conversation, / In French, as ne'er they did before. / Indeed, to claim a little more, / The plants and trees,[1] with smiling features, / Are turn'd by me to talking creatures. / Who says, that this is not enchanting? / 'Ah,' says the critics, 'hear what vaunting! / From one whose work, all told, no more is / Than half-a-dozen baby stories. '[2] / Would you a theme more credible, my censors, / In graver tone, and style which now and then soars? / Then list! For ten long years the men of Troy, / By means that only heroes can employ, / Had held the allied hosts of Greece at bay, -- / Their minings, batterings, stormings day by day, / Their hundred battles on the crimson plain, / Their blood of thousand heroes, all in vain, -- / When, by Minerva's art, a horse of wood, / Of lofty size before their city stood, / Whose flanks immense the sage Ulysses hold, / Brave Diomed, and Ajax fierce and bold, / Whom, with their myrmidons, the huge machine / Would bear within the fated town unseen, / To wreak upon its very gods their rage -- / Unheard-of stratagem, in any age. / Which well its crafty authors did repay.... / 'Enough, enough,' our critic folks will say; / 'Your period excites alarm, / Lest you should do your lungs some harm; / And then your monstrous wooden horse, / With squadrons in it at their ease, / Is even harder to endorse / Than Renard cheating Raven of his cheese. / And, more than that, it fits you ill / To wield the old heroic quill. ' / Well, then, a humbler tone, if such your will is: -- / Long sigh'd and pined the jealous Amaryllis / For her Alcippus, in the sad belief, / None, save her sheep and dog, would know her grief. / Thyrsis, who knows, among the willows slips, / And hears the gentle shepherdess's lips / Beseech the kind and gentle zephyr / To bear these accents to her lover.... / 'Stop! ' says my censor: / 'To laws of rhyme quite irreducible, / That couplet needs again the crucible; / Poetic men, sir, / Must nicely shun the shocks / Of rhymes unorthodox. ' / A curse on critics! hold your tongue! / Know I not how to end my song? / Of time and strength what greater waste / Than my attempt to suit your taste?

[1]: _The plants and trees_. -- Aristotle's rule for pure fable is that its _dramatis personae_ should be animals only -- excluding man. Dr. Johnson (writing upon Gay's Fables) agrees in this dictum "generally. " But hardly any of the fabulists, from Aesop downwards, seem to have bound themselves by the rule; and in this fable we have La Fontaine rather exulting in his assignment of speech, &c., not only to the lower animals but to "plants and trees," &c., as well as otherwise defying the "hard to suit," _i.e._, the critics.