'Giaour/ etc. There is, then, surely a good chance of my getting at least £10, or perhaps £20 if my book sells well, for two pieces, each of (say) 600 lines. On that I could subsist for a long time and a long time meant more poems and more money. You see, if you only live as economically as I am going to … Well, many things may be done.
After a little preliminary thought, I came to this: I had had these almost two years two tales in my head, that is, connected narratives with a definite beginning and end; a story, a fact: not the embodiment of a passing humour that, being exalted, has to be climbed up to, but a narrative, to be clothed in the best clothes I could put on it, and then sent on a journey with the reader to amuse and try to instruct him, if only in a lesson of pathos, on the road.—I at once set upon the first of my 'tales.'
By the time it grew dusk, I had finished over two hundred lines of it. I was not at all satisfied. I had not, I thought, twined the melody of the rhythm enough into the sense: that is, had lost some of the scent, in transplanting my flower. I was afraid of becoming a mere painter, and losing the scent altogether. Still, I reflected, the less subtle I try to be, the more likely am I to please those who are likely to read this poem of mine. One must live prose, before one lives poetry: prose is paying for your cake, and poetry is eating it. Get something to support your body first: the body is the keystone. It is no good having your brain full and your belly empty, for at that rate you soon die, and look foolish.
For all such thoughts, I was a little ashamed of what I had done. My muse had not moved me: she dwelt but in the suburbs of my good pleasure. 'Well, well, it cannot be helped.'—So I left her there, and went out into the streets to buy stamps and return Colonel James his money.
I wandered far that night. At last to the Serpentine, where I stood, some little time, trying to explain the lamp reflections across the water—two together, large space, two together. Then I must have gone down Piccadilly, and through Leicester Square: then into
