Short Poems

What mean ye by this print so rare?
Ye wits, of Eton jealous:
Behold! your rivals soar in air,
And ye are heavy-fellows!

In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,
Will. Cobbett has done well:
You visit him on earth again,
He'll visit you in hell.

My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play before the play is done:
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.

Prince, show me the quickest way and best
To gain the subject of my moan;
We've neither spinsters nor relics out West--
These do I love, and these alone.

Young Knight, the lists are set to-day!
Hereafter shall be time to pray
In sepulture, with hands of stone.
Ride, then! outride the bugle blown!
And gaily dinging down the van,
Charge with a cheer--'Set on! Set on!
Virtue is that becrowns a Man!'

It's such a
Bore
Being always
Poor.

We have scarcely time to tell thee
Of the strange and gifted Shelley,
Kind hearted man, but ill-fated,
So youthful drowned and cremated.

Oh, England!
Sick in head and sick in heart,
Sick in whole and every part:
And yet sicker thou art still
For thinking that thou art not ill.

A year ago, you swore, fond she!
'To love, to honour,' and so forth:
Such was the vow you pledged to me,
And here's exactly what 'tis worth.

When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.