I felt more loving for a small, dead hound
than for my girl on St Valentine's Day,
and thought of my mother's eyes, self-drowned
in lamentation for a dog's decay.
It happened in the early, peaceful hours
when Val and Venus summon sprites around
and send them through the fibres of flowers
that Romeos with hopeful hearts will buy.
Love went about its business while powers
that keep a dying dog from aye-closed eye
rested from their labours and let die.

The instant the morbid news reached my head,
an echo of Kipling's wisdom I keep there
savaged my grief as, mockingly, it said,
" Don't give your heart for a dof to tear!"
so I could not weep since Anger held the rein
and drove, it seemed, from where Love had misled,
towards a northern province of the brain
where Care is banished correctively:
a little Nod where everybody's Cain
ponders alone love's laws reflectively
and scans his loves, his life objectively.