THE PASSIONAL NOTE

In the years of my season erotic,

When Eros was lord of my days,

And I loved, with a love idiotic,

The Mabels and Madges and Mays;

When a purple and passionate lyric

Would sing all the night in my head,—

I yearned, like the young Mr. Viereck,

For everything red.

I doted on poems of passion,

And put my own pantings in rime,

To celebrate, after a fashion,

The damsels who took up my time.

I fed upon Swinburne, believe me,

I feasted on Byron and Burns,

And couplets from Sappho would give me

Most exquisite turns.

How apparent it was that our songbirds —

Our Emerson, Lowell, and Payne,

And Bryant and Drake — were the wrong birds

To pipe to the passional strain.

There was, in a word, nothing doing

In all of the rimes that they wrote;

They seemed to be always pursuing

The ethical note.

What truth, I inquired, was so mighty,

What ethical thing was so rare,

As the limbs of the white Aphrodite

Or a strand of her heaven-kissed hair!

The girdle of red-headed Helen

Outweighed all the wherefores and whys,

And Wisdom elected to dwell in

A pair of blue eyes.

Now lyrical sizzlers and scorchers

Fail somehow to set me ablaze;

No longer are exquisite tortures

Provoked by these passionate lays.

I've tinned — and I can n't say I've missed‘ em —

The poems of passion and sin.

Some things one gets out of one's system,

And other things in.