Elizabeth

Elizabeth — it surely is most fit

(Logic and common usage so commanding)

In thy own book that first thy name be writ,

*Zeno and other sages notwithstanding:

And I have other reasons for so doing

Besides my innate love of contradiction:

Each poet — if a poet — in pursuing

The muses thro’ their bowers of Truth or Fiction,

Has studied very little of his part,

Read nothing, written less — in short’s a fool

Endued with neither soul, nor sense, nor art,

Being ignorant of one important rule,

Employed in even the theses of the school —

Called —— I forget the heathenish Greek name —

(Called any thing, its meaning is the same)

“Always write first things uppermost in the heart”

Edgar

* It was a saying of this philosopher “that one’s own name should never appear in one’s own book”.

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