Page:Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Kipling, 1899.djvu/62

 TO THE UNKNOWN GODDESS

you conquer my heart with your beauty; my soul going out from afar?

Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious shikar?

Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking, and blind?

Shall I meet you next season at Simla, oh sweetest and best of your kind?

Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West,

Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my breast?

Will you stay in the Plains till September—my passion as warm as the day?

Will you bring me to book on the Mountains, or where the thermantidotes play?

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