Lewis Carroll

PHANTASMAGORIA AND OTHER POEMS
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POETA FIT, NON NASCITUR

 “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’?”
 “Nay, nay!  You must not hastily
 To such conclusions jump.
 
 “Such epithets, like pepper,
 Give zest to what you write;
 And, if you strew them sparely,
 They whet the appetite:
 But if you lay them on too (...)
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