Ballade Des Professeurs Du Temps Fadis: (Or, as Long as You're Up, Get Me a Grant!)

Ubi sunt the great professors
For whom I scrimped my nickels and dimes?
Those literary effervescers
Like Snopes on “Chaucer’s Life and Times”?
Where’s March on “English Mummers and Mimes”?
Or Schwartz on “Thomas: Wolfe and Mann”?
They’re gone on Fulbrights and Guggenheims —
Où sont les professeurs d’antan?

Ubi sunt those smooth caressers
Of Wyatt’s rhythms, Spenser’s rhymes?
Where are the raging intercessors
For Genius and her minor crimes?
Who’ll shed new light on Dickens’s Chimes?
Or Yeats’s debt to the Voyage of Bran?
None! they’re gone on Fulbrights and Guggenheims —
Où sont les professeurs d’antan?

And ubi sunt those donnish dressers,
The young instructors, green as limes,
Who spoke as if gagged with tongue depressors,
Yet trilled the word that foreign climes
Would nourish their work on “Peter Grimes,”
Or “Peter Bell,” or “Peter Pan”?
Eheu! Gone on Fulbrights and Guggenheims —
Où sont les professeurs d’antan?

Et tu? Who me? I confess that I’m set to scuttle Soul for the Bodleian,
To be gone with the Fulbrights and Guggenheims
Où sont les professeurs d’antan!