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Edgar Allan Poe
To Margaret
Written for Margaret Bassett’s autograph album, this brief piece is a parodic cento — built from deliberately misquoted lines of famous poets, assembled to comic effect. Poe’s irreverent use of borrowed lines to deflect the earnest demands of album-verse was characteristic of his wit in social settings.
Who hath seduced thee to this foul revolt
From the pure well of Beauty undefiled?
So banished from true wisdom to prefer
Such squalid wit to honourable rhyme?
To write? To scribble? Nonsense and no more?
I will not write upon this argument.
To write is human — not to write divine.
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