Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence!
     Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
     God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
     Oh, that rose has prior claims--
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
     Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together:
     Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Garden in a Spanish monastery      Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
     Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for "parsley"?
     What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?

Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
     Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
     And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
     Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps--
Marked with L. for our initial!
     (He-he! There his lily snaps!)

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
     Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
     Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
     --Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
     (That is, if he'd let it show!)

When he finishes refection,
     Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
     As do I, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
     Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
     While he drains his at one gulp.

Oh, those melons? If he's able
     We're to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
     All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
     Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!--And I, too, at such trouble,
     Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There's a great text in Galatians,
     Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
     One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
     Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
     Off to hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel
     On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
     Hand and foot in Belial's gripe:
If I double down its pages
     At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
     Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Or, there's Satan!--one might venture
     Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
     As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
     We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . .
'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratiâ
     Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r--you swine!