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Home  »  library  »  poem  »  On a Nankin Plate

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

On a Nankin Plate

By Henry Austin Dobson (1840–1921)

Villanelle

“AH me, but it might have been!

Was there ever so dismal a fate?”

Quoth the little blue mandarin.

“Such a maid as was never seen:

She passed, tho’ I cried to her, ‘Wait,’—

Ah me, but it might have been!

“I cried, ‘O my Flower, my Queen,

Be mine!’—’Twas precipitate,”

Quoth the little blue mandarin.

“But then … she was just sixteen,—

Long-eyed, as a lily straight,—

Ah me, but it might have been!

“As it was, from her palankeen

She laughed—‘You’re a week too late!’”

(Quoth the little blue mandarin.)

“That is why, in a mist of spleen

I mourn on this Nankin Plate.

Ah me, but it might have been!”

Quoth the little blue mandarin.