Sir, pardon this unheralded address
from America’s Outback. I confess
you daunt me with your storm-wracked Isle of Aves
where shipwrecked sailors wager with the waves
while two striplings couple beneath a spar
by the sage sufferance of your scholar-tar
who grants my love and me the tolerance
our hidebound fathers have denied their sons.

Like yours my lines and themes were once writ large.
Alas! my lame pentameters lacked charge.
Heroic couplets? I abandoned hope,
dazzled by one man’s art, another’s scope.
Dimeter and trimeter I devise
more skillfully, though off-rhyme is my vice.
Forewarned (the very word is like a curse)
please weigh these gleanings from a farmer’s verse.

Mine is a rustic art unlike your own:
no high-flown musings on a graven bone
nor gowns cast off for trysts with the unknown,
no successors driven to the despair
suffered daily by your unworthy heir.
Though the estate of poetry seems grim,
young men must hope when prospects look most dim.
I am your servant and disciple—