The Sonnet
POET, beware! The sonnet’s primrose pathIs all too tempting for thy feet to tread.Not on this journey shalt thou earn thy bread,Because the sated reader roars in wrath:‘Little indeed to say the singer hath,And little sense in all that he hath said;Such rhymes are lightly writ but hardly read,And naught but stubble is his aftermath!’
Then shall he cast that bonny book of thineWhere the extreme waste-paper basket gapes,There shall thy futile fancies peak and pine,With other minor poets, pallid shapes,Who come a long way short of the divine,Tormented souls of imitative apes.