The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [William Wesley], and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the fall of 2007, the Author, then in ill spirits due to poor online poker performance and the fickle fancy of Anna Kournikova, had retired to a lonely bar stool at the John Harvard’s Restaurant in Harvard Square. In consequence of a slight indisposition, a handful of Nyquil gelcaps had been self-prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that the Boston Celtics basketball club was laying waste to the Knickerbokers of New York upon multiple suspended television screens. The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. (He can also claim with utmost confidence that some wastrel purloined no less than three hundred dollars from his unreliable money clip, but nevermind.)
On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and surrounding cocktail napkins, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a comely lass whose boyfriend liked not at all the attention given her tramp stamp by the Author’s eager hands, and on his return from the hospital, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him.
A stately multi-purpose pleasure-dome decree:
Where Charles, the dirty river, ran
Through public works measureless to man
With stands and stanchions were girdled round:
And there were columnists bright with sinuous curls,
Where blossomed many an invective-laden screed;
Enfolding sullen spouts of jealousy.
Through the green heart athwart a sullen cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
By Auerbach wailing for his Joe Forte! his Len Bias!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless Sam Adams seething,
As if this earth in XXL Antoine Walker jersey were breathing heavily,
A mighty roar momently was forced:
Huge basketballs vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or female referees beneath Heinsohn’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing bricks at once and ever
It flung up momently the dirty river.
Through Schilling and Vrabel the dirty river ran,
Then reached the public works measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless brick:
And ‘mid this tumult The Big Ticket heard from within
Ancestral Russell prophesying win!
Floated midway on the court;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the rafters and the crowd.
A professional team with multiple scoring options!
In a vision once he saw:
It was a Californian maid,
Singing of hoary cliches.
Could he revive within
His benefactor’s focus-grouped slogan,
To such a deep pocket ‘twould win him,
He would build that dome in air,
That champagne wish! those caviar dreams!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Gino! Gino!
Pick and roll round him thrice,
And close your eyes with simple joy,
For he on Korbel’s hath fed,
And drunk the sweat of Posey and Pierce.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a renowned poet, and has never won a no-limit hand raising pre-flop with pocket Jacks.