VILLON'S APOLOGY

(On Reading Stevenson's Essay)

Published in the Poetry Review

London, England

December 1912

(page 540)

My duty is to God and man

To do my work as best I can.

I need, if that is to be done,

Leisure and food and drink and fun.

Why should I bow to scarecrow rule

Of prig, professor, prude and fool?

And who dare say I was a shirk?

I did more perdurable work

Than any other of my time:

I limned my century in rime!

Why should brute drudgery extort

Respect that is denied to thought?

Who knows what agony of toil

Goes to make poets' cauldrons boil?

Kindly permit me for the nonce

The pride of having been a ponce!

A trade that Stevenson, thinks I,

Might have found difficult to ply.

If I should make another Will,

I'd leave him, in a codicil,

What he most needs to make him stronger—

An inch of nose, or something longer.