Saturday, January 22, 2005

Age and wisdom: a birthday poem

"What were vices have become the fashion of the day"
Seneca

"Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?"
A E Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XLIV
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/housman.html


What? Still alive at forty-two?
Is there no justice, only luck?
All those years of sniffing glue
And still you haven't come unstuck.

Oh, you have changed, there's no denying
For excess you have begun to pay
But even without very much dyeing
You still aren't like Dorian, grey

What once were childish misdemeanours
Now are habits, hard to break:
The iron grip of Dionysus
Is, like a cocktail, hard to shake.



Martin Locock, 1984

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