Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/314

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

Died in his native Dodgetown At the age of sixty-odd, People said—the few who said anything at all— That he had lived a futile life, And that Europe was to blame: His continual hankering after the Old World Had made him a failure in the New.


 * At seventeen he was reading In Dickens-land, just out,

And Ruskin's Stones of Venice, And Maudle's Life of Raphael; And he was never the same afterward. He decided on romance. Romance, with Albert, was always a good bit back, And some distance away— Least of all in booming Dodgetown, In the year of grace eighteen-seventy-three. There was Shelley poetizing in Pisa (Thirty-five years before Albert was born); And there was Byron with his countess In that conspiratorial old palace at Ravenna (Four thousand wide miles from Main Street, Or more). Et cetera.


 * At twenty-one Albert "took a position",

But he never put his heart into the work.