Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LOVE AND LATIN, by ELIZABETH DOTEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LOVE AND LATIN, by                    
First Line: Dear girls, never marry for knowledge
Last Line: "and not with a latin ""amo."
Alternate Author Name(s): Doten, Lizzie
Subject(s): Hearts; Love


DEAR girls, never marry for knowledge,
(Though that should of course form a part,)
For often the head, in a college,
Gets wise at the cost of the heart.
Let me tell you a fact that is real—
I once had a beau in my youth,
My brightest and best "beau ideal"
Of manliness, goodness, and truth.

O, he talked of the Greeks and the Romans,
Of Normans, and Saxons, and Celts,
And he quoted from Virgil, and Homer,
And Plato, and——somebody else.
And he told me his deathless affection,
By means of a thousand strange herbs,
With numberless words in connection,
Derived from the roots of Greek verbs.

One night, as a sly innuendo,
When Nature was mantled in snow,
He wrote in the frost on the window,
A sweet word in Latin—"amo."
O, it needed no words for expression,
For that I had long understood;
But there was his written confession—
Present tense and indicative mood.

But O, how man's passion will vary!
For scarcely a year had passed by,
When he changed the "amo" to "amare,"
But instead of an "e" was a "y."
Yes, a Mary had certainly taken
The heart once so fondly my own,
And I, the rejected, forsaken,
Was left to reflection alone.

Since then I've a horror of Latin,
And students uncommonly smart;
True love, one should always put that in,
To balance the head by the heart.
To be a fine scholar and linguist
Is much to one's credit, I know,
But "I love" should be said in plain English,
And not with a Latin "amo."





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