Smells sweet through a summer of kisses and perfumes an autumn of tears
Is sadder at root than a winter--its hopes heavy-hearted like fears.
Though I love your Grace more than I love little Letty, the maid of
the mill,
Yet the heat of your lips when I kiss them" (you see we were intimate,
Bill)
"And the beat of the delicate blood in your eyelids of azure and white
Leave the taste of the grave in my mouth and the shadow of death on my
sight.
Fill the cup--twine the chaplet--come into the garden--get out of the
house--
Drink to _me_ with your eyes--there's a banquet behind, where worms
only carouse!
As I said to sweet Katie, who lived by the brook on the land Philip
farmed--
Worms shall graze where my kisses found pasture!" The Duchess, I may
say, was charmed.
It was read to the Duke, and he cried like a child. If you'll give me
a pill,
I'll go on till past midnight. That poem was said to be--Somebody's, Bill.
But you see you can always be sure of my hand as the mother that bore me
By the fact that I never write verse which has never been written
before me.
Other poets--I blush for them, Bill--may adore and repudiate in turn a
Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna.
Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is
built on--
"Of man's _first_ disobedience"--I've heard it attributed, dammy, to
Milton.
Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I may say,