Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
I. Disappointment in LoveThe Dirty Old Man
William Allingham (18241889)I
Soap, towels, or brushes were not in his plan.
For forty long years, as the neighbors declared,
His house never once had been cleaned or repaired.
One terrible blot in a ledger so neat:
The shop full of hardware, but black as a hearse,
And the rest of the mansion a thousand times worse.
Looked spotty in sunshine and streaky in rain;
The window-sills sprouted with mildewy grass,
And the panes from being broken were known to be glass.
The merchant who sold, or the goods he ’d to sell;
But for house and for man a new title took growth,
Like a fungus,—the Dirt gave its name to them both.
The wood was half rot, and the metal half rust,
Old curtains, half cobwebs, hung grimly aloof;
’T was a Spiders’ Elysium from cellar to roof.
Lives busy and dirty as ever he can;
With dirt on his fingers and dirt on his face,
For the Dirty Old Man thinks the dirt no disgrace.
His clothes are a proverb, a marvel of dirt;
The dirt is pervading, unfading, exceeding,—
Yet the Dirty Old Man has both learning and breeding.
Have entered his shop, less to buy than to stare;
And have afterwards said, though the dirt was so frightful,
The Dirty Man’s manners were truly delightful.
To peep at the door of the wonderful room
Such stories are told about, none of them true!—
The keyhole itself has no mortal seen through.
The luncheon ’s prepared, and the guests are expected,
The handsome young host he is gallant and gay,
For his love and her friends will be with him to-day.
The wine beams its brightest, the flowers bloom their best;
Yet the host need not smile, and no guests will appear,
For his sweetheart is dead, as he shortly shall hear.
’T is a room deaf and dumb mid the city’s uproar.
The guests, for whose joyance that table was spread,
May now enter as ghosts, for they ’re every one dead.
The seats are in order, the dishes a-row:
But the luncheon was wealth to the rat and the mouse
Whose descendants have long left the Dirty Old House.
The flowers fallen to powder, the wine swathed in crust;
A nosegay was laid before one special chair,
And the faded blue ribbon that bound it lies there.
Wherever he now is, I hope he ’s more clean.
Yet give we a thought free of scoffing or ban
To that Dirty Old House and that Dirty Old Man.