THE PASSIONAL NOTE

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 n'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.