Short Poems

Your present last year weighed exactly a pound,
But I see it's a quarter to-day:
Your system of reckoning's very unsound:
At least, sir, a half you should pay.

So modest are you both in looks and life,
I wonder how you ever knew your wife.

Informer , libel-monger, cut-throat, knave,
Pander, to every loathsome vice a slave,
Vacerra, it is marvellous that you
With these resources are a pauper too.

Six rings on each finger young Algernon wears,
And keeps them all on in his bath, it appears,
And when he is lying asleep of a night.
‘The reason? He has not a ring-case’? That's right.

One humble hind remained the rites to pay
To Maro's ashes where alone they lay:
Silius resolved to help the abandoned shade
And now his brother-poet comes to aid.

Young Amyntas considered his pigs extra fine,
And was rather too anxious to pamper the swine,
Till one day while shaking down acorns beneath
He fell from the branches and so met his death.
His father condemned the fell tree to the fire
And burned all its wood on the funeral pyre.
Let my neighbours insist that their pigs fattened be,
If my man counts the herd, that's sufficient for me.

L UPERCUS is beautiful Glycera's lover,
But for a whole month not one kiss he's had of her,
His passionate ardour to slake.
He goes about town in most sorrowful guise,
And to friendly inquirers he sadly replies—
‘I'm afraid that she has a toothache’.

My pleasant solace, my delightful care,
Than whom no heart has ever been more dear,
O give me first a kiss with wine-stained lip
Before I take the cup wherefroMyou sip:
And then if you will love's true joys bestow,
Not Jove himself surpasses me, I trow.

You ask why I will not a learned wife take?
Too often a ‘mentulae lapsus’ I make.

Hob is too small to have a mound raised o'er him:
One clod of earth would be too heavy for him.