Page:Carroll - Phantasmagoria and other poems (1869).djvu/124

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112
A DOUBLE ACROSTIC.

There comes a welcome summons—hope revives,
And fading eyes grow bright, and pulses quicken;
Incessant pop the corks, and busy knives
Dispense the tongue and chicken.

Flushed with new life, the crowd flows back again:
And all is tangled talk and mazy motion—
Much like a waving field of golden grain,
Or a tempestuous ocean.

And thus they give the time that Nature meant
For peaceful sleep and meditative snores,
To thoughtless din, and mindless merriment,
And waste of shoes and floors.

And one (we name him not) that flies the flowers,
That dreads the dances, and that shuns the salads,
They doom to pass in solitude the hours,
Writing acrostic-ballads.