This is the sequel to this Byron poem.
To the Sighing Strephon
1.
YOUR pardon, my friend,
If my rhymes did offend,
Your pardon, a thousand times o’er,
From friendship I strove,
Your pangs to remove,
But I swear I will do so no more.
2.
Since your beautiful maid
Your flame has repaid,
No more I your folly regret;
She’s now most divine,
And I bow at the shrine,
Of this quickly reformed coquette.
3.
Yet still, I must own,
I should never have known,
From your verses, what else she deserv’d,
Your pain seem’d so great,
I pitied your fate,
As your fair was so dev’lish reserv’d.
4.
Since the balm-breathing kiss,
Of this magical Miss,
Can such wonderful transports produce,
Since the “world you forget,”
“When your lips once have met,”
My counsel will get but abuse.
5.
You say, “When I rove,
I know nothing of love,”
‘Tis true, I am given to range,
If I rightly remember,
I’ve lov’d a good number,
But there’s pleasure, at least, in a change.
6.
I will not advance,
By the rules of romance,
To humour a whimsical fair,
Though a smile may delight,
Yet a frown will affright,
Or drive me to dreadful despair.
7.
While my blood is thus warm,
I ne’er shall reform,
To mix in the Platonists’ school;
Of this I am sure,
Was my passion so pure,
Thy mistress would think me a fool.
8.
And if I should shun,
Every woman for one,
Whose image must fill my whole breast;
Whom I must prefer,
And sigh but for her,
What an insult ‘twould be to the rest!
9.
Now, Strephon, good-bye,
I cannot deny,
Your passion appears most absurd;
Such love as you plead,
Is pure love, indeed,
For it only consists in the word.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I can identify with the situation presented in that poem. I wish I could say that I am or that I think of myself as being a really good person who is guided by principles and so on. I don’t think those ways, and reason doesn’t even enter into the equation. Well, there’s an all-encompassing, singular reason. This is not entirely relevant, but I remember seeing a clip of Norman Mailer talking about Clinton. Mailer said that people had liked Clinton’s affair on some level and had looked at it and said to themselves, “I’m like he is. I’m not that good. I’ve thought about doing that.” The other layer, according to Mailer, was that Clinton was like a Pharaoh, standing in front of the people, showing his manhood, as the people cheered at the promising sign, implied in the display, for the harvest, as in the economic harvest and economic boom. It’s like Clinton is and was this mixture of contradictions, and people could see different parts of themselves in him. I try to look at the different sides of myself and at the different aspects of my situation, but, in the end, I’m like Clinton in my helplessness before my state of being. I look at myself and see myself thinking and feeling a certain way, and it just ends up being the case that it is the way it is. That’s the strange aspect of society these days. It’s as if the most one can hope for is to see the inner workings of one’s motivations. Most people can’t even do that and run around like chronically-stressed animals, with the thalamic mast cells degranulating wildly, but even being able to analyze things, these days, doesn’t provide one with any way of changing anything or acting.
Haha, excellent.
You’re a reader of Celine and Byron who links to The eXiled in your sidebar — are you a fan of John Dolan? His essays and memoirs are the great unsung chronicle of beta/omega life in the feminist era.
“You’re a reader of Celine and Byron who links to The eXiled in your sidebar — are you a fan of John Dolan?”
I am, actually. It was his writings on Celine that turned me on to him.
It’s surprising that Dolan (and his alter ego Gary Brecher) aren’t more widely read in the gender realist community. Dolan’s a sharp, erudite critic of academic feminism (have you read his article on Andrea Dworkin?), and the whole point of the War Nerd is to debunk the pretty lie that male aggression is just a social construct.
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