The Grave of the Suicide (who thought better of it)
My eye grew as dull as a half-scallop’d oyster,
And soon would my death in the Times have rejoiced her;
So to Battersea-fields, for no meadows are moister,
I hurried to drown both myself and my woes.
Down life’s sunny stream many seasons I’d floated
Till pleasures now bored me, on which I had doted;
So I vowed that my death should by lovers be quoted
Where the pale, sentimental asparagus grows.
Alas! I exclaim’d, with a half-broken hiccup,
The soft crumbs of comfort no more can I pick up;
My sorrows are mix’d as it were in a tea-cup,
Without any sugar to take off the taste.
But sorrows are often inflicted to try us;
Kind fortune, invisibly, often stands by us;
And now on the roof of the famous eel-pie house
The blinker-eyed goddess was luckily placed.
She kindly assured me my views were mistaken,
That really by Betty I wasn’t forsaken;
So I walk’d back to town and got into the Fakenham
coach, to return to my Betty again.
Four lovers already had tried to divert her
Attentions from me, but their eagerness hurt her;
She said that she knew that I wouldn’t desert her,
And now is the suicide gayest of men!”