The Poets at Tea […]

3.—(Swinburne, who let it get cold)

As the sin that was sweet in the sinning
Is foul in the ending thereof,
As the heat of the summer’s beginning
Is past in the winter of love:
O purity, painful and pleading!
O coldness, ineffably gray!
Oh, hear us, our handmaid unheeding,
And take it away!

• Barry Pain (1864-1928)

A Melton-Mowbray Pork Pie

Strange pie that is almost a passion,
     O passion immoral for pie!
Unknown are the ways that they fashion,
     Unknown and unseen of the eye.

The pie that is marbled and mottled,
     The pie that digests with a sigh:
For all is not Bass that is bottled,
     And all is not pork that is pie.

• Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947)