  OFF! at the neck and wristband! Off!—and laid on the bed! And she of the sweet white kist band Is the one whom I chose to wed. Off! the two pearl-white buttons! And yet it is laid out there (To return, as it were, to our muttons), The shirt I am going to wear. I list to the bells’ sweet chiming, In the still of the Sabbath morn, And I ask myself, in rhyming, How a buttonless shirt is worn. Shall I put myself in a passion, And curse the unwifely act, Or—which isn’t a poet’s fashion— Behave with a little tact? Shall I show her the shirt and scold her, My scarcely a month-wed wife, Or wait till our union’s older, For the frown and the wordy strife? Ah! soul of my soul, my darling, No buttonless shirt shall rise To set the old Adam snarling At his Eve in their Paradise. Are we twain made one to wrangle, That the wifely way’s unlearnt, That a shirt has gone wrong in the mangle Or a handkerchief’s badly burnt? No; never shall wrath be blighting The beautiful bliss that buds, And I’ll fasten—your love requiting— My buttonless shirt with studs. |
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