My friends, we thought in verse to make reply
and hoped you’d let the conversation die:
for not for long nor First with Things like these
atop this blog will we our readers please.
Like Joseph Bottum crying over Rod
and pulling hair while praying, “O my God!”
was I when first I read your awe-ful post.
So straight to bed like Bottum seen a ghost -
(Lo, is that he with covers over head?)
I read your shrill retort; my cheeks were red
with laughter - not with pain - to see such fluff
when we had packed our post with nobler stuff.
With smiles overspread, in bed, the sheet
high pulled, there safe and sound I hoped the heat
to let go by. Yet then it seemed, I thought,
unfit a thing to let our post as nought
be held. With courage from my bed I spring,
I give my dear Iacobus then a ring:
“O sir,” I say, “be strong, don’t faint away!”
Then he to me: “We cannot yield the day!
Though intellectuals we may not be,
(the Doctor well is named for such as we!)
nor even scholars properly so called:
did brains like hairs recede we’d both be bald!”
“My friend, Iacobe, say again?” “Oh, sir,
no thing had I in mind, you will aver.”
“Then, man, it’s time these knaves we ought confound:
one line from us and Bottum’s on the ground!”

Behold: You sure mistook the words we wrote
upon his piece, as though we did not note,
“Insanity” or had no inkling when
now jibes, now jests were flowing from his pen.
Insist, you do, upon this Swallow theme
And write away the rest - was it a dream?
You’re stunn’d and shock’d (and hurt?) we’ve missed the thrust,
yet Bottum you excuse and do entrust
unfairly ears and eyes to deaf and blind.
While under covers Bottum bold repined
of you who treat his errors hand in glove,
with prompt and crisp subscriptions dewed with love.

Whence comes your blindness we shall not enquire,
lest we arrive at things that raise our ire.
Nor shall we stoop to badger you, forsooth,
on how you’re last with First in seeing Truth.
Yet will we fail to piously purloin
from Scripture’s “motes” and “eyes” as we rejoin?
High hors’d as Schoolmarms though we sit accused,
by Asinorum Doctor we’re abused!
“Reactionaries few, with shutter’d minds,
your Culture Inauthentic!” he opines.
Before we’ve chance to tell him we agree,
or ask where Bottum speaks so poignantly,
He shouts: “In Public, you’re not suited well,
as discourse ‘tween Inheritors of Hell
And Heaven brings disquiet; honest strife…”
(not yet content, he makes to twist the knife)
“…offends your pedant sensibility!”
And this all sneered without civility!

Now, mark you, clergy, friends, and readers dear,
that our reply is couched in greatest fear,
we do not want to give the least offense,
and so forewent our right to prose defense.

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