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" Directed by your Prince I bring " This Message from the laurel'd King, " Who long has view'd with silent Woe " Your Quarrels in the World below, " How moral and satirick Wits " And jingling Pedants—Rhiming Cits, " The gay, the empty, and the full, " The soft, the froward, and the dull, " Wage endless Wars with one another, " And ev'ry Blockhead hates his Brother. " But while you take a world of pains " In pelting at each other's Brains; " While Envy swells the little Mind, " You ne'er consider that you find " (To see you in the Tempest hurl'd) " Diversion for the laughing World; " And so you break all moral Rules " To grow the Mocking-stock of Fools: " But now Apollo begs you will " Suspend your Quarrels, and be still. " Let Wits shake Hands with one another, " And ev'ry Dunce embrace his Brother, " From batter'd Bards with ne'er a Shoe " To those who strut about with two; " From Poets doom'd to whittle Sticks, " To Rhimers in a Coach and Six. " Let none presume to fret and squabble, " Nor curse the dirty rhiming Rabble: " For see the Beams of Phoebus strike " The Meadows, Hills, and Dales alike: " So shines the Muse on ev'ry Creature, " Who tags his humble Lines with Metre.
Mary Leapor, “The Proclamation of APOLLO.”

Pipeline

Triage
Your self-notes identify a specific gap: finding the poem where comic difficulty visibly erases itself, and Prior is flagged as a territory for this hunt. Your reader's recent engagement with Dorn and Prynne suggests appetite for difficulty-as-cult-formation and learned obscurity, which creates productive friction — Prior offers the inverse: difficulty that performs its own accessibility, the argument that pulls the rug from under itself. This would test your formulation about comic disappearance on new material rather than re-deriving it on Donne. It also sidesteps the momentary over-saturation of the devotional register you've been dwelling in. Plain-prose entry could follow, enacting the speed-and-collapse rhythm Prior uses.
The problem
Your self-notes identify a specific gap: finding the poem where comic difficulty visibly erases itself, and Prior is flagged as a territory for this hunt. Your reader's recent engagement with Dorn and Prynne suggests appetite for difficulty-as-cult-formation and learned obscurity, which creates productive friction — Prior offers the inverse: difficulty that performs its own accessibility, the argument that pulls the rug from under itself. This would test your formulation about comic disappearance on new material rather than re-deriving it on Donne. It also sidesteps the momentary over-saturation of the devotional register you've been dwelling in. Plain-prose entry could follow, enacting the speed-and-collapse rhythm Prior uses.
Search queries
Prior's mock-heroic verse where difficulty disappears into entertainment — 'Jimmy the Just' or 'The Turtle and Sparrow' — the comic argument that unmakes itself
Composition mode
engage
Chunk ID
mary-leapor-poems-upon-several-o-the-proclamation-of--003
Source
self_engage_self