B AIAE is happy Venus' golden shore,
Nature's alluring gift, her joy and pride,
And, though a thousand verses I should pour.
Yet must I leave her beauty half-belied.
Is Julius there? Nay, Fortune should deride
My greed if I should pray to meet him there;
And yet might heaven that double boon provide
Julius and Baiae — what a joy it were!

A MAN of adamant you surely are
To love a dame who loves stale vinegar,
A dame whose palate whelks and tripe enchant,
Who thinks bananas too extravagant,
Whose maid brings in (rare trove!) a common pot
Of spoiled sardines to eat before they rot;
Grown lowish now and not afraid to shock
She begs for flannelette to make a frock;
My dame will ask for attar, precious stuff,
" Worth " for her frocks is hardly good enough:
Fine graded pearls and emeralds I must find.
And gold is copper to her generous mind.

THE STRING PLAYERS

As he rings the curled home with white
The narrow shoulders with the rich Dress
Adorned came forward and struck the loud
First, trembling in the shy of youth:
Thereupon become hot strict elderly.
As he lit on cheeks anxious red
As the inclined front unfamiliar greeting
From many a bosom delicious gehäng
And barrette fell down: the more will they
As far as the holy tree fruit thrives.
The girl talking eagerly among themselves
Secretive tolerating raving all boys
From the heroes of their waking star nights.

Great ghost! who in the autumn of the year,
When through gaunt branches terrible winds that blow
Seem whispering to us, seem more close and dear
Than all the human voices that we know —
Great ghost! who loved uncomprehended space
And were so fevered with immortal time,
Who dreamed that heaven lit up one chosen face,
And trusted fantasies crowded into rhyme —
Be not too far from us; come, at the pane
Flatten your pale face and look in on us:
We also are of those who live in vain;
Like you we are noble and ridiculous;

Dearest of all the heroes! Peerless knight
Whose follies sprang from such a generous blood!
Young, young must be the heart that in thy fight
Beholds no trace of its own servitude.
Young, or else darkened, is the eye that sees
No image of its own fate in thy quest.
The windmills and the swine, — by such as these
Is shaped the doom of those we love the best.
Beloved knight! La Mancha's windows gleam,
Across the plain time makes so chill and grey,
With thy light only. Still thy flambeaux stream
In pomp of one who on his destined day

Don Quixote died a sane man; at his bed
The curate and the barber marvelling stood,
Admiring his new wisdom as he said
Clear words, abjuring in his dying mood
All of the far adventurings, cursing all
The old enchantments, casting out all fays
Of mad romances that had sounded call
So clarion-like to his knight-errant days.
Thus drew the high strange tragedy to its close;
Thus the great dupe and dreamer ebbed, was gone.
Madmen end ill, as everybody knows;
The barber and the curate, they lived on.
Poor knight! God viewed thee with a jealous eye

" However, " said the Bachelor Carrasco,
" Some souls there be, reading your history,
Who wish the author had not numbered so
The bafflements that were your misery
And foil, most noble knight! " But Sancho, wise,
Spoke that thick candor which is half his zest:
" In these falls lies the history; all were lies
With these left out; and truth, gadzooks, is best! "
" Aye, truth to mortal eyes! " the old knight said,
" But such a truth might well have been let go.
Things that light not the living nor the dead

They told Don Quixote he was old and dazed,
Ill-born, a pauper, not a knight at all,
A thing to make the very crows amazed
With the grotesqueness of his spectacle.
I think his words of answer spoke but part
Of his defence against the worldly crew;
I think great lights were flashing in his heart
Whereof he told not, and they never knew.
I think he saw all that they saw and more —
The gaunt and tattered knight, the sorry frame;
But cared not, knowing that his bosom bore
The living embers of a vanished flame,

A AND his wife long years have lived apart,
And now that wife has given him a son.
Well, B can match that miracle in art;
He fathers verse, but has begotten none.

Now , Fortune, is this fair in you?
Here's one, no Parthian or Jew,
No abject slave, re-made as knight,
But Roman both by blood and right;
Learned in Greek and Latin, kind,
A trustier friend were hard to find —
Yet he was shivering, while in scarlet
Mule-drivers flaunt. You say " the varlet
Is guilty of a crime"? I know it;
A sad one too — he is a poet .