Classic Poem

I, TOO , have faked the glamor of gray towers,
I, too, have sung the ease of sultry hours —
Deep woods, sweet lanes, wide playing fields, smooth ponds
— Where clean boys train to sell their country's bonds.
Ah, high delights untasted by outsiders!
The Graduate College with its dreaming spiders!
May windows to the summer drunks flung wide!
The ivied peal of bells at eventide!
The drone of doves in immemorial trees,
The bumble of innumerable bees! —
And Beauty, Beauty, oozing everywhere
Like maple-sap from maples! Dreaming there,
I have sometimes stepped in Beauty on the street
And slipped, sustaining bruises blue but sweet,
And felt the keen swift faith, I will assert,
That God is fairly good to Struthers Burt!

— For God and Struthers Burt are gentle folks:
They differ from Jack Dempsey and Joe Doaks.
God is a big beneficent trustee,
Who asks well-bred professors in to tea;
Has swans and swimming-pools about the grounds;
Collects old clocks, and sometimes rides to hounds.
God was a club or two ahead of Burt,
But not enough to make him cold or curt —
They both believe in college comradeship,
Old college ways, the slow delicious drip
Of cool damp verse; and also, I suppose,
The keen and peevish tang of high-pitched prose.
Burt sometimes goes to stay with God for weeks
And utters fierce shrill Philadelphian squeaks.