Classic Poem

He wears a red rose in his buttonhole,
A city-clerk on Sunday dining out:
And as the music surges over the din
The heady quavering of the violin
Sings through his blood, and puts old cares to rout,
And tingles, quickening, through his shrunken soul,

Till he forgets his ledgers, and the prim
Black, crabbed figures, and the qualmy smell
Of ink and musty leather and lead glaze,
As, in eternities of Sunday days,
He dives through shivering waves, or rides the swell
On rose-red seas of melody aswim.