Obit on Parnassus

Death before forty's no bar. Lo!

These had accomplished their feats:

Chatterton, Burns, and Kit Marlowe,

Byron and Chelley and Keats.

Death, the eventual sensor,

Lays for the forties, and so

Tookoff Jane Austen and Spenser,

Stevenson, Hood, and poor Poe.


You'll leave a better-lined wallet
By reaching the end of your rope
After fifty, like Shakespeare and Smollett,
Thackeray, Dickens, and Pope.


Try for the sixties--but say, boy,
that's when the tombstones were built on
Butler and Sheridan, the play boy
Arnold and Coleridge and Milton.


Three score ant ten--the tides rippling
Over the bar; slip the hawser.
Godspeed to Clemens and Kipling,
Swinburne and Browning and Chaucer.


Some stave the debt off but paid it
At eighty--that's after law.
Wordsworth and Tennyson made it,
And Meredith, Hardy, and Shaw.


But, Death, while you make up your quota,
Please note this confession of candor--
That I wouldn't give an iota
To linger ninety, like Landor.


Francis Scott Fitzgerald  (Thousand-and-First Ship)