Facility

It is strange how one works easily at times. I wrote this so quickly that I might almost say I had reached the end before I had come to the beginning. In such a mood I wonder why everybody does not write poetry. Get a Roget's Thesaurus, a rhyming dictionary: sit before your typewriter with a strong glass of coffee at your elbow, and just click the stuff off. 


So easy 'tis to make a rhyme,
That did the world but know it,
Your coachman might Parnassus climb,
Your butler be a poet.

Then, oh, how charming it would be
If, when in haste hysteric
You called the page, you learned that he
Was grappling with a lyric,

Or else what rapture it would yield.,
When cook sent up the salad,
To find within the depths concealed
A touching little ballad.

Or if for tea and toast you yearned,
What joy to find upon it
The chambermaid had coyly laid
A palpitating sonnet.

You baker could the fashion set;
Your butcher might respond well;
With ever tart a triolet,
With every chop a rondel.

Your tailor's bill...well, I'll be blowed!
Dear chap! I never knowed him...
He's gone an written me an ode,
Instead of what I owed him.

So easy 'tis to rhyme...yet stay!
Oh, terrible misgiving!
Please do not give the game away...
I've got to make my living.

From Robert Service's Ballads of a Bohemian