And that was why my lovely birthday sonnet,
Meeting this obstacle, was wrecked upon it.
“Oh, fairest day of springtime’s fairest month”—
Thus I began, and there I stuck at “month.”
Her birthday is the first of May.
“Dog-gone it!”
I cried, “I can’t go on, now I’ve begun it—
Unless, perchance, I write of May the one-th.”
Then went I to my lady love, with all
The story of my tenderness and trouble—