Temperance: A Tract for the Times

THE ARTIST. For FRIEDA I I know that Earth is false and Hell And Heaven to man are deaf and dumb, too. I know what last dim oracle Every Panurge is bound to come to. I find more mental bread and cheese In bounty of one brandy bottle Than in all books Averrhoes Once built about his Aristotle. II The babble of my slut, I swear Gives joy and certitudes intenser Than all the wit of a Voltaire And all the science of a Spencer. My poppy-pipe—its shows surpass! More and more beautiful and brainier Than all the lumps of Pheidias And all the daubs of de la Peña. III My music and my verse are mine. I know myself and what my task is! Be off, ye syncopated swine, Wagner, Vitruvius, Velasquez, Swift, Shakespeare, Shelley, Socrates, Sterne, Blake, Petronius, Canova! I’ll make my universe to please Myself, like jolly old Jehovah.