To Jane Austen

O THOU who to romance’s sleights
Didst come as dawn to elves and sprites,
Replacing spectre-haunted nights
With daylight’s genial reign;
Shrewd exorcist — who couldst so well
Romance’s goblin bands expel,
Yet keep thine own unrivaled spell,
Incomparable Jane!

How doth thy bodkin’s slender steel
Men’s frailties and faults reveal!
To thee Achilles is all heel,
Thou lash of Folly’s train!
Thou scourgest tomboy, cynic, grig,
The man whose diction is all wig,
The snob, the autocrat, the prig,
Inimitable Jane!

Thou seekest truth, and when ’t is found
Thou dost its sportive whims confound;
The shafts, the stable, and the pound
Shall now its pranks restrain;
It dreads thy logic’s bristling fence,
Thy files of serried evidence,
Thy panoplied, embattled sense,
Irrefragable Jane!

I know thy passion’s cautious throes,
Its timed and tactful overflows,
Its firmly regulated glows,
Its exemplary pain;
Oh, if a tense should court a mood,
Or axioms propositions wooed,
Their raptures were not more subdued,
Inestimable Jane!

I know thy vices’ sober frown —
Mephisto in a doctor’s gown —
Thy levities that robe the clown
In wisdom’s sweeping train:
That magisterial giddiness,
That syllogistic thoughtlessness,
That edifying wickedness,
Impermeable Jane!

O little world so trim and flat,
Where Fate must straighten his cravat,
And Death himself must use the mat,
Ere they could entrance gain!
Thine earth a box of mignonette,
A bird-cage in a window set,
A shelved and shapely cabinet,
Inviolable Jane!

O eye of eagle and of mole,
Thou shrewd and penetrating soul,
Yet off thy little English knoll
So impotent and vain;
Satiric — yet beneath thy glee
An orgy of propriety,
Thou riotest in decency,
Invulnerable Jane!

Was e’er a keen, satiric bent
So quaintly, comically blent
With smug and purring self-content,
And homiletic strain?
A Puck in cassock or a nun
In motley — art thou both or one?
O frolic lore, O surpliced fun,
Inexplicable Jane!

What pen could draw thee, line by line,
With art ironic and benign,
And truth unflawed; what pen but thine
O woman sage and sane?
I would this gladdened world might see
Another Jane to laugh at thee,
Rare target for rare archery,
Irrevocable Jane!

Lightly through time thy figure trips,
Skirt lifted where the highway dips,
Thy brow now crinkled, now thy lips,
As mirth rules or disdain:
The barred and bolted centuries
Thou frontest with unerring keys,
The ‘Park,’ the ‘Abbey,’ ‘Emma’ — these
Shall swift admission gain:
And, if the porter claim a fee,
Fling ‘Pride’ or ‘Sensibility’:
The flattered door shall ope for thee,
Imperishable Jane!