For in my morning sheet I’d seen it bruited,

Mid talk of Jazz and Fox Trot, plaids and checks,

That boxing was a sport precisely suited

To what it quaintly called the gentler sex;

I thought about the coming day when bevies

Of beauty would be found inside the ropes,

And saw you, eminent among the “heavies,”

The whitest of white hopes.

I saw—and at the vision England’s stock ran

High above par—how in the padded strife,