Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/315

October 7, 1914.]



was so good of you, so like your grace,
 * Ye on whose brows the brand of Rheims is graven,

To spare the poet of our common race
 * And find forgiveness for the Bard of Avon;

And all the little lore he feebly guessed,
 * Phantasy, rhetoric, and trope and sermon,

To clasp politely to your mailéd breast,
 * Refine, transmute and render wholly German.

Seeing in Henry V. a Prussian King,
 * Tracing in Hamlet a more moody ,

You put new might into the master's wing.
 * He seems more wonderful to us, and wiser;

Not as he dimly sang in ages gone
 * He warbles to us now, but wild with culture,

Exchanging for the mere parochial Swan
 * The full-mouthed war notes of the Potsdam Vulture.

So shall he live, and live eternally
 * (In humble homage to the War Lord's mitten)

"This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
 * Heligoland, of course, and not Great Britain:

A thousand carven saints are lain in dust
 * In lands the Prussian Junker sets his boot on,

But and his honoured bust
 * Shall save themselves by being partly Teuton.

And when the hooves of those imperial swine
 * Leap, as of course they will, the ocean's borders,

And England's trampled down from Thames to Tyne,
 * And Wells is burnt, and Winchester, by orders,

It may be tears shall start into the eyes
 * Of helméd colonels in our Midland valleys,

And they shall spare the tomb where lies;
 * He was a German (Deutschland über alles).

Almost I seem to see the Uhlans stand,
 * Paying their pious sixpences to enter

That little homestead of the Fatherland
 * That housed the dramatist in Stratford's centre;

A trifle flushed, maybe, with English beer,
 * But mutely reverent and not talking chattily,

They write beneath their names: "A friend lives here;
 * Not to be ransacked. Signed, The Modern ."

A glorious scene. The voice of is dumb;
 * Not pining now for Frankfort or for Münich,

The sub-lieutenant slides with quivering thumb
 * A picture-posteard underneath his tunic.

Till then, if any dawn of doubt creeps in
 * Ilow best to judge the Bard and praise him rightly,

Let me implore the actors of Berlin 
 * To play Macbeth to crowded houses nightly.