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Two Poems
By Douglas Ainslie
I—The Death of Verlaine
"Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise."
Verlaine.
So the poet of grey slips away,
The poor singer from over the strait,
Who sat by the Paris highway,
Whose life was the laughter of fate;
The laughter of fate, but the woe
Of the gods and the mortals who heard
The mystical modes as they flow—
Broken phrase, riven lute, broken word,
Broken up as the attar is crushed
By the steel of the mercantile weights
From the soul of the roses that blushed
Through the scroll of Elysian gates.
As
