Sherry Chandler » Richard Henry Wilde
Richard Henry Wilde
I try not to steal too much from other people’s ideas on this weblog but I do want to share Daniel Hoffman’s Poetry Month Pick with you. Wilde is a 19th century American poet, having immigrated from Dublin to Augusta at age 12. The poem below, which Hoffman found in John Hollander’s American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, he presents as one of the first to refer to distinctly American fauna: the mockingbird instead of the nightingale.
To the Mocking-Bird
WHO shall thy gay buffoonery describe?
Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!
Thine ever ready notes of ridicule
Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.
Wit, sophist, songster, Yorick of thy tribe,
Thou sportive satirist of Nature’s school,
To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
Arch-mocker and mad Abbot of Misrule!
For such thou art by day–but all night long
Thou pourest a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
As if thou didst in this thy moonlight song
Like to the melancholy Jacques complain,
Musing on falsehood, folly, vice, and wrong,
And sighing for thy motley coat again.
— Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847)
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