Thomas Love Peacock Poems

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Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock (October 18, 1785 - January 23, 1866) was an English satirist and author. Peacock was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work. He wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting — characters at a table discussing and criticizing the philosophical opinions of the day. He worked for the British East India Company. His friends, as he hints, thought it wrong that so clever a man should be earning so little money. In the autumn of 1808 he became private secretary to Sir Home Popham, commanding the fleet before Flushing. His preconceived affection for the sea did not reconcile him to nautical realities. "Writing poetry", he says, "or doing anything else that is rational, in this floating inferno, is next to a moral impossibility. I would give the world to be at home and devote the winter to the composition of a comedy". He did write prologues and addresses for dramatic performances on board the HMS Venerable: his dramatic taste then and for nine years subsequently found expression in attempts at comedies and pieces of a still lighter class, all of which fail from lack of ease of dialogue and the over-elaboration of incident and humour. He left the Venerable in March 1809. Another of his longer poems, "The Genius of the Thames", which he had meditated in 1807, was published in 1810.

the pardon
 
 
My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
A... [read poem]
in the smoking car
 
 
The eyelids meet. He'll catch a little nap.
The grizzled, crew-cut head drops to his chest.... [read poem]
i dug, beneath the cypress shade
 
 
I dug, beneath the cypress shade,
What well might seem an elfin's grave;
And every ple... [read poem]
advice to a prophet
 
 
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,... [read poem]
upon my lap my sovereign sits
 
 
Upon my lap my sovereign sits
And sucks upon my breast;
Meantime his love maintains my lif... [read poem]
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