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I Phyllidula and the spoils of Gouvernet
WHERE, Lady, are the days | |
| When you could go out in a hired hansom | |
| Without footmen and equipments | |
| And dine in a cheap restaurant? | |
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| Phyllidula now, with your powdered Swiss footman | 5 |
| Clanking the door shut, | |
| and lying; | |
| And carpets from Savonnier, and from Persia, | |
| And your new service at dinner, | |
| And plates from Germain, | 10 |
| And cabinets and chests from Martin (almost lacquer), | |
| And your white vases from Japan, | |
| And the lustre of diamonds, | |
| Etcetera, etcetera and etcetera? | |
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II To Madame du Châtelet
If you’d have me go on loving you | 15 |
| Give me back the time of the thing. | |
| |
| Will you give me dawn light at evening? | |
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| Time has driven me out of the fine plaisaunces, | |
| The parks with the swards all over dew, | |
| And grass going glassy with the light on it, | 20 |
| The green stretches where love is and the grapes | |
| Hang in yellow-white and dark clusters ready for pressing. | |
| And if now we can’t fit with our time of life | |
| There is not much but its evil left us. | |
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| Life gives us two minutes, two seasons— | 25 |
| One to be dull in; | |
| Two deaths—and to stop loving and being lovable, | |
| That is the real death, | |
| The other is little beside it. | |
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| Crying after the follies gone by me, | 30 |
| Quiet talking is all that is left us— | |
| Gentle talking, not like the first talking, less lively; | |
| And to follow after friendship, as they call it, | |
| Weeping that we can follow naught else. | |
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III To Madame Lullin
You’ll wonder that an old man of eighty | 35 |
| Can go on writing you verses … | |
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| Grass showing under the snow, | |
| Birds singing late in the year! | |
| |
| And Tibullus could say of his death, in his Latin; | |
| “Delia, I would look on you, dying.” | 40 |
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| And Delia herself fading out, | |
| Forgetting even her beauty. | |
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