| Gr-r-r — there go, my heart’s abhorrence! | |
| Water your damned flower-pots, do! | |
| If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, | |
| God’s blood, would not mine kill you! | |
| What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? | |
| Oh, that rose has prior claims — | |
| Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? | |
| Hell dry you up with its flames! | |
| | |
| At the meal we sit together; | |
| Salve tibi! I must hear | |
| Wise talk of the kind of weather, | |
| Sort of season, time of year: | |
| Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely | |
| Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt: | |
| What’s the Latin name for “parsley”? | |
| What’s the Greek name for “Swine’s Snout”? | |
| | |
| Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished, | |
| Laid with care on our own shelf! | |
| With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished, | |
| And a goblet for ourself, | |
| Rinsed like something sacrificial | |
| Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps — | |
| Marked with L. for our initial! | |
| (He-he! There his lily snaps!) | |
| | |
| Saint, forsooth! While Brown Dolores | |
| Squats outside the Convent bank | |
| With Sanchicha, telling stories, | |
| Steeping tresses in the tank, | |
| Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs, | |
| — Can’t I see his dead eye glow, | |
| Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s? | |
| (That is, if he’d let it show!) | |
| | |
| When he finishes refection, | |
| Knife and fork he never lays | |
| Cross-wise, to my recollection, | |
| As I do, in Jesu’s praise. | |
| I the Trinity illustrate, | |
| Drinking watered orange-pulp — | |
| In three sips the Arian frustrate; | |
| While he drains his at one gulp! | |
| | |
| Oh, those melons! if he’s able | |
| We’re to have a feast; so nice! | |
| One goes to the Abbot’s table, | |
| All of us get each a slice. | |
| How go on your flowers? None double? | |
| Not one fruit-sort can you spy? | |
| Strange! And I, too, at such trouble, | |
| Keep them close-nipped on the sly! | |
| | |
| There’s a great text in Galatians, | |
| Once you trip on it, entails | |
| Twenty-nine distinct damnations, | |
| One sure, if another fails; | |
| If I trip him just a-dying, | |
| Sure of heaven as sure can be, | |
| Spin him round and send him flying | |
| Off to hell, a Manichee? | |
| | |
| Or, my scrofulous French novel | |
| On gray paper with blunt type! | |
| Simply glance at it, you grovel | |
| Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe; | |
| If I double down the pages | |
| At the woeful sixteenth print, | |
| When he gathers his greengages, | |
| Ope a sieve and slip it in’t? | |
| | |
| Or, there’s Satan! one might venture | |
| Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave | |
| Such a flaw in the indenture | |
| As he’d miss till, past retrieve, | |
| Blasted lay that rose-acacia | |
| We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . . . | |
| ’St, there’s Vespers! Plena grati | |
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r — you swine!
|
