Nude nymph, when from Neuberg's' I led her In velvet enshrined and encased, When with raret Virginia I fed her, And pampered each maidenly taste On 'Old Judge' and 'Lone Jack' and brown 'Bird's-eye The best that a mortal might get— Did she know how, from whiteness of curds, I should tum her to jet? She was blond and impassive and stately When first our acquaintance began, When she smiled from the pipe-bowl sedately On the 'Stunt' who was scarcely a man. But labuntur anni fugaces, And changed in due season were we, For she wears the blackest of faces, And I'm a D.C. Unfailing the comfort she gave me In the days when I owned to a heart, When the charmers that used to enslave me For Home or the Hills would depart. She was Polly or Agnes or Kitty (Whoever pro tem was my flame), And I found her most ready to pity, And—always the same. At dawn, when the pig broke from cover, At noon, when the pleaders were met, She clung to the lips of her lover As never live maiden did yet; At the Bund, when I waited the far light That brought me my mails o'er the main— At night, when the tents, in the starlight, Showed white on the plain. And now, though each finely cut feature Is flattened and polished away, I hold her the loveliest creature That ever was fashioned from clay. Let an epitaph thus, then, be wrought for Her tomb, when the smash shall arrive: 'Hic jacet the life's love I bought for Rupees twenty-five.'
Choose another poem