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Collected poems

By Austin Dobson: Ninth edition
  

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626

THE HOLOCAUST

“Heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.” —Maud.

Above my mantelshelf there stands
A little bronze sarcophagus,
Carved by its unknown artist's hands,
With this one word—Amoribus!
Along the lid a Love lies dead—
Across his breast his broken bow;
Elsewhere they dig his tiny bed,
And round it women wailing go:
A trick, a toy—mere “Paris ware,”
Some Quartier-Latin sculptor's whim,
Wrought in a fit of mock despair,
With sight, it may be something dim,
Because the love of yesterday,
Had left the grenier, light Musette,
And she who made the morrow gay,
Lutine or Mimi, was not yet—
A toy. But ah! what hopes deferred,
(O friend, with sympathetic eye!)
What vows (now decently interred)
Within that “narrow compass” lie!

627

For there, last night, not sadly, too,
With one live ember I cremated
A nest of cooing billets-doux,
That just two decades back were dated.
1889.