POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
POSTPONEMENT
When Albert F. McComb
Died in his native Dodgetown
At the age of sixty-odd,
People said—the few who said anything at all—
That he had lived a futile life,
And that Europe was to blame:
His continual hankering after the Old World
Had made him a failure in the New.
At seventeen he was reading In Dickens-land, just out,
And Ruskin's Stones of Venice,
And Maudle's Life of Raphael;
And he was never the same afterward.
He decided on romance.
Romance, with Albert, was always a good bit back,
And some distance away—
Least of all in booming Dodgetown,
In the year of grace eighteen-seventy-three.
There was Shelley poetizing in Pisa
(Thirty-five years before Albert was born);
And there was Byron with his countess
In that conspiratorial old palace at Ravenna
(Four thousand wide miles from Main Street,
Or more). Et cetera.
At twenty-one Albert "took a position",
But he never put his heart into the work.
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