HE world and wife are out of town,
The blast sweeps down the empty street;
The bobby in a study brown
Thinks of the sea upon his beat.
The cab-horse dozes on the rank,
The empty ’buses cease to race;
The hungry cat roams, lean and lank—
The blinds are down in Portland Place.
The birds still sing in Regent’s Park,
The ducks emit their bronchial quack;
But all day long from dawn to dark
The crossing-sweeper’s trade is slack.
The Langham porter’s wand’ring eye
Encounters ne’er a human face;
No smoke curls upward to the sky—
The blinds are down in Portland Place.
The thoroughfare is broad and wide,
The vestry keeps the roadway clean,
And I can walk on either side,
Or ’gainst each separate lamp-post lean.
I’m king of all that I survey—
As sad as Selkirk’s is my case—
Oh, soon, to save my reason, may
The blinds go up in Portland Place!
The Shirt Buttons.
(AFTER SWINBURNE.)
FF! at the neck and wristband!
Off!—and laid on the bed!
And she of the sweet white kist band
Is the one whom I chose to wed.
Off! the two pearl-white buttons!
And yet it is laid out there
(To return, as it were, to our muttons),
The shirt I am going to wear.
I list to the bells’ sweet chiming,
In the still of the Sabbath morn,
And I ask myself, in rhyming,
How a buttonless shirt is worn.
Shall I put myself in a passion,
And curse the unwifely act,
Or—which isn’t a poet’s fashion—
Behave with a little tact?
Shall I show her the shirt and scold her,
My scarcely a month-wed wife,
Or wait till our union’s older,
For the frown and the wordy strife?
Ah! soul of my soul, my darling,
No buttonless shirt shall rise
To set the old Adam snarling
At his Eve in their Paradise.
Are we twain made one to wrangle,
That the wifely way’s unlearnt,
That a shirt has gone wrong in the mangle
Or a handkerchief’s badly burnt?
No; never shall wrath be blighting
The beautiful bliss that buds,
And I’ll fasten—your love requiting—
My buttonless shirt with studs.