Impetuously I sprang from bed,
    Long before lunch was up,
  That I might drain the dizzy dew
    From day’s first golden cup.

  In swift devouring ecstacy
    Each toil in turn was done;
  I had done lying on the lawn
    Three minutes after one.

  For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
    The duties shine like stars;
  I formed my uncle’s character,
    Decreasing his cigars.

  But could my kind engross me?  No! 
    Stern Art ­what sons escape her? 
  Soon I was drawing Gladstone’s nose
    On scraps of blotting paper.

  Then on ­to play one-fingered tunes
    Upon my aunt’s piano. 
  In short, I have a headlong soul,
    I much resemble Hanno.

  (Forgive the entrance of the not
    Too cogent Carthaginian. 
  It may have been to make a rhyme;
    I lean to that opinion).

  Then my great work of book research
    Till dusk I took in hand ­
  The forming of a final, sound
    Opinion on The Strand.

  But when I quenched the midnight oil,
    And closed The Referee,
  Whose thirty volumes folio
    I take to bed with me,

  I had a rather funny dream,
    Intense, that is, and mystic;
  I dreamed that, with one leap and yell,
    The world became artistic.

  The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
    Declined to open shops ­

  And Cooks recorded frames of mind
    In sad and subtle chops.

  The stars were weary of routine: 
    The trees in the plantation
  Were growing every fruit at once,
    In search of a sensation.

  The moon went for a moonlight stroll,
    And tried to be a bard,
  And gazed enraptured at itself: 
    I left it trying hard.

  The sea had nothing but a mood
    Of ‘vague ironic gloom,’
  With which t’explain its presence in
    My upstairs drawing-room.

  The sun had read a little book
    That struck him with a notion: 
  He drowned himself and all his fires
    Deep in the hissing ocean.

  Then all was dark, lawless, and lost: 
    I heard great devilish wings: 
  I knew that Art had won, and snapt
    The Covenant of Things.

  I cried aloud, and I awoke,
    New labours in my head. 
  I set my teeth, and manfully
    Began to lie in bed.

  Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
    So I my life conduct. 
  Each morning see some task begun,
    Each evening see it chucked.

  But still, in sudden moods of dusk,
    I hear those great weird wings,
  Feel vaguely thankful to the vast
    Stupidity of things.