Dear President, whose art sublime <br />Gives perpetuity to time, <br />And bids transactions of a day, <br />That fleeting hours would waft away <br />To dark futurity, survive, <br />And in unfading beauty live,-- <br />You cannot with a grace decline <br />A special mandate of the Nine, <br />Yourself, whatever task you choose, <br />So much indebted to the Muse. <br />Thus say the sisterhood :-- We come; <br />Fix well your pallet on your thumb, <br />Prepare the pencil and the tints, <br />We come to furnish you with hints. <br />French disappointment, British glory, <br />Must be the subject of the story. <br />First strike a curve, a graceful bow, <br />Then slope it to a point below; <br />Your outline easy, airy, light, <br />Filled up becomes a paper kite. <br />Let independence, sanguine, horrid, <br />Blaze like a meteor in the forehead: <br />Beneath (but lay aside your graces) <br />Draw six-and-twenty rueful faces, <br />Each with a staring, steadfast eye, <br />Fixed on his great and good ally. <br />France flies the kite -- 'tis on the wing-- <br />Britannia's lightning cuts the string. <br />The wind that raised it, ere it ceases, <br />Just rends it into thirteen pieces, <br />Takes charge of every fluttering sheet, <br />And lays them all at George's feet. <br />Iberia, trembling from afar, <br />Renounces the confederate war; <br />Her efforts and her arts o'ercome, <br />France calls her shattered navies home: <br />Repenting Holland learns to mourn <br />The sacred treaties she has torn; <br />Astonishment and awe profound <br />Are stamped upon the nations round; <br />Without one friend, above all foes, <br />Britannia gives the world repose.<br /><br />William Cowper<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-sir-joshua-reynolds/
