In place of blood, within his veins,
There courses poetry's rich gore.
Where limericks lewd and quaint quatrains,
With sonnets jostle, by the score.
In garret dark, with sharpened quill,
A cautious cut releases rhyme.
Now similes, like red gouts spill,
And metaphor compounds the crime.
Alliteration's lovely lilt
And onomatopoeia's rage
Do, like a knife sunk to the hilt,
Pour forth emotion on the page.
As darkness falls, his life-blood flows;
By candle-light he scribes his last.
A work of genius it shows,
But his faint flame is fading fast.
Now death upon our poet calls,
His soul is drained, his race is run;
One thought consoles him as he falls-
His greatest masterpiece is done.
As life's last embers fade and die,
The candle falls, fate's final joke;
Before his glazed and dying eye
The manuscript goes up in smoke.
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