The Vision of Judgment 090

XC 

Now the bard, glad to get an audience which 
By no means oft was his case below, 
Began to cough, and hawk, and hem, and pitch 
His voice into that awful note of woe 
To all unhappy hearers within reach 
Of poets when the tide of rhyme's in flow; 
But stuck fast with his first hexameter, 
Not one of all whose gouty feet would stir. 

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-1824) 
ByronLongJudgment