Classic Poem

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'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 .