I bend and watch the grackles billing,

And fight with tears as I float by;

O be a fowl for my heart's filling!

O be a bird, yet never fly!

... so then naturally

This Count Rainuv I speak of

(Certainly I did not expect you would ever have heard of him;

You are American poets, aren't you?

That's rather awful ... I am the only American poet

I could ever tolerate ... well, sniff and pass....)

Therefore ... well, I knew Rainuv.

(My P. G. course at Penn, you'll remember;

A little Anglo-Saxon and Basuto,

But Provencal, mostly. Most don't go in for that....

You haven't, of course ... What, no Provencal?

Well, of course, I know

Rather more than you do. That's my specialty.

But then—Omnis Gallia est divisa—but no matter.

Not fit, perhaps you'd say, that, to be quoted

Before ladies.... That's your rather amusing prudishness....)

Well, this Rainuv, then,

A person with a squint like a flash

Of square fishes ... being rather worse than most

Of the usual literati

Said, being carried off by desire of boasting

That he knew all the mid-Victorians

Et ab lor bos amics:

(He thought it was something to boast of.)

We'll say he said he smoked with Tennyson,

And—deeper pit—pax vobiscum—went to vespers

With Adelaide Anne Procter; helped Bob Browning elope

With Elizabeth and her lapdog (said it bit him)

Said he was the first man Blake told

All about the angels in a pear-tree at Peckham Rye

Blake drew them for him, he said; they were grackles, not angels—

(Blake's not a mid-Victorian, but you don't know better)

So ... we come, being slightly irritated, to facing him down.

"... And George Eliot?" we ask lightly.

"Roomed with him," nodded Rainuv confidently,

"At college!"... Ah, bos amic! bos amic!

Rainuv is a king to you....

Three centuries from now (you dead and messy) men whispering insolently

(Eeni meeni mini mo...) will boast that their great-grand-uncles

Were kicked by me in passing....

The folk of the wood called me—

"There sits a golden bird

Upon your mother's pear-tree—"

But I never said a word.

The Sleepy People whispered—

"The bird is singing now."

But I felt not then like leaving bed

Nor listening beneath the bough.

But the wronged world beat my portals—

"Come out or be sore oppressed!"

So I threw a stone at the grackle

And my throbbing heart had rest.

Spring comes—yet where the dream that glows?

There only waves upon the lea

A lonely pear-bough where doth doze

A bird of green, and merely he:

Why weave of him our poetry?

Why of a Grackle need we sing?

Ah, far another fowl for me—

I seek Spring Chickens in the Spring.

Though May returns, and frisking shows

Her ankles through this white clad tree,

Alas, old Spring's gone with the rose,

Gone is all old romance and glee—

Yet still a joy remains to me—

Softly our lyric lutes unstring,

Far from this Grackle we shall flee

And seek Spring Chickens in the Spring!

Too soon Youth's mss must close,

(Omar) its rose be pot-pourri;

What of this bird and all his woes!

Catulla, I would fly to thee—

Bright bird of luring lingerie,

Of bushy bob, of knees aswing,

This golden task be mine in fee,

To seek Spring Chickens in the Spring!

Prince, let us leave this grove, pardie,

A flapper is a fairer thing:

Let us fare fast where such there be,

And seek Spring Chickens in the Spring!