(Don Juan, Canto xiv. Stanzas 70–72.)
HE was a cold, good, honourable man,
Proud of his birth, and proud of everything;
A goodly spirit for a state divan,
A figure fit to walk before a king;
Tall, stately, form’d to lead the courtly van
On birthdays, glorious with a star and string;
The very model of a chamberlain—
And such I mean to make him when I reign.
But there was something wanting on the whole—
I don’t know what, and therefore cannot tell—
Which pretty women—the sweet souls!—call soul.
Certes it was not body; he was well
Proportion’d, as a poplar or a pole,
A handsome man, that human miracle;
And in each circumstance of love or war
Had still preserved his perpendicular.
Still there was something wanting, as I’ve said—
That undefinable “Je ne sçais quoi,”
Which, for what I know, may of yore have led
To Homer’s Iliad, since it drew to Troy
The Greek Eve, Helen, from the Spartan’s bed;
Though on the whole, no doubt, the Dardan boy
Was much inferior to King Menelaüs:—
But thus it is some women will betray us.
Any corrections or public domain poems I should have here? Email me at poems (at) this domain.