Classic Poem

We now begin to sing a song,
For our theme a numeral taking:
We sing the song of Number Three—
All bliss must end in aching.

Our number was an Arab born,
But, former sins forsaking,
She soon became a Christian good.
Not one commandment breaking.

A lobster never turned as red
As Number Three on taking
A man together with a maid:
Her anger left them quaking.

In summer warm, at seven o'clock
She drank her coffee, slaking
Her thirst in winter cold at nine—
A cosier hour for waking.

But now 'tis time to change the rhyme,
For changed and dark the morrow
That dawned at last for Number Three:
She suffered pain and sorrow.

A cobbler came along who said—
O a cruel cobbler he was!—
Like a Seven small on a crescent moon
The head of Number Three was;

That the mystic number was Seven among
The old Pythagoreans,
While the crescent was Diana's sign
And also the Sabæans’.

And that Three herself was the shibboleth
Of the senior bonze at Babel;
Intriguing with whom, she brought to birth
The Holy-Trinity fable.

Then a tailor arrived who said with a smile,
“Your fancy's been cutting a caper.
This Three of yours never existed at all,
Except as a mark on paper.”

When she heard the tailor, poor Number Three
Resented the libel madly;
Like a duck distracted she waddled about,
And wailed, and whimpered sadly,

“I'm as old as the forest, as old as the sea,
As old as yon star that flashes.
I have seen whole races and kingdoms rise,
And seen them sink to ashes.

“I have stood at the noisy loom of time
For many a thousand ages.
I have gazed into nature's fashioning womb,
Where eternal tumult rages.

“I have seen the sensual forces dark,
But never let them surge in
This heart of mine: I have watched the show,
A pure, unspotted virgin.

“But what avails my virtue now,
By both wise and foolish flouted?
The world is bad, unjust and mad;
The best of us are doubted.

“But thy hope and faith and love, my heart,
They have been forced to leave me;
Of my coffee good and my drop of rum
No sceptic can bereave me.”