Is there a parson much bemused in beer, A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, A clerk foredoomed his father’s soul to cross, Who pens a stanza when he should engross?
Alexander Pope Quotes
Call, if you will, bad rhyming a disease, It gives men happiness, or leaves them ease.
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.
But touch me, and no minister so sore; Whoever offends at some unlucky time Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme, Sacred to ridicule his whole life long, And the sad burden of some merry song.
Who says in verse what others say in prose.
Ask where’s the North? At York tis on the Tweed; In Scotland at the Orcades; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.
A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practice it.
On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
And hence one master – passion in the breast, Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows up the rest.
The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still.
