Tell me if at all thou mindest
When folks flee, as if on wings,
From thee as at ease thou grindest:
Tell me fifty thousand things.
Grinder, gentle-hearted Grinder!
Ruffians who led evil lives,
Soothed by thy sweet strains, are kinder
To their bullocks and their wives:
Children, when they see thy supple
Form approach, are out like shots;
Half-a-bar sets several couple
Waltzing in convenient spots;
Not with clumsy Jacks or Georges:
Unprofaned by grasp of man
Maidens speed those simple orgies,
Betsey Jane with Betsey Ann.
As they love thee in St. Giles’s
Thou art loved in Grosvenor Square:
None of those engaging smiles is
Unreciprocated there.
Often, ere yet thou hast hammer’d
Through thy four delicious airs,
Coins are flung thee by enamour’d
Housemaids upon area stairs:
E’en the ambrosial-whisker’d flunkey
Eyes thy boots and thine unkempt
Beard and melancholy monkey
More in pity than contempt.
Far from England, in the sunny
South, where Anio leaps in foam,
Thou wast rear’d, till lack of money
Drew thee from thy vineclad home:
And thy mate, the sinewy Jocko,
From Brazil or Afric came,
Land of simoom and sirocco—
And he seems extremely tame.
There he quaff’d the undefilèd
Spring, or hung with apelike glee,
By his teeth or tail or eyelid,
To the slippery mango-tree: