Page:Anthology of Magazine Verse (1921).djvu/27

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   Striving also to become   Graceful and indiscreet.First Woman. Sappho and Aristotle   Have wandered through the centuries,   Dressed in an occasional novelty—   A little twist of outward form.   They have always been ashamed   To be caught in a friendly talk.Second Woman. When emotion and the mind   Engage in deliberate conservation,   One hundred nightingales   And intellectuals find a common ground,   And curse the meeting of their slaves!First Woman. The mind must only play   With polished relics of emotion,   And the heart must never lighten   Burdens of the mind.Second Woman. I desire to be   Irrelevant and voluble,   Leaving my terse disgust for a moment.   I have met an erudite poet.   With a northern hardness   Motionless beneath his youthful robes.   He shuns the quivering fluencies   Of emotion, and shifts his dominoes   Within a room of tortured angles.   But away from this creative room   He sells himself to the whims   Of his wife, a young virago   With a calculating nose.   Beneath the flagrant pose   Of his double life   Emotion and the mind   Look disconsolately at each other.First Woman. Lyrical abandon   And mental cautiousness   Must not mingle to a magic   Glowing, yet deliberate!

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