Venice masks

Friday 31 January 2020

Feminine Arithmetic - Charles Graham Halpine

LAURA
ON me he shall ne’er put a ring,
  So, mamma, ’t is vain to take trouble—
For I was but eighteen in spring,
  While his age exactly is double.

MAMMA
He ’s but in his thirty-sixth year,
  Tall, handsome, good-natured and witty,
And should you refuse him, my dear,
  May you die an old maid without pity!

LAURA
His figure, I grant you, will pass,
  And at present he ’s young enough plenty;
But when I am sixty, alas!
  Will not he be a hundred and twenty?

Charles Graham Halpine (1829 - 1868) Northern Ireland
Source: The Little Book of Society Verse, ed. by CM Fuess and HC Stearns. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922

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