Explore "A Song of Little Girls" by Thomas Burke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I want to make a song of the little girls / That live about this quarter. / I could make a song of boys quite easily with words, / But words are too blunt for such delicate things as girls. / I would like to make my song of them with bees and butterflies. / One looks at the boy, and says Boy; / And lo, one has described him. / But little girls are morning light and melody; / Their happy hair flutters and flies, or curtains their laughing faces -- / Faces glad as the sun at dawn. / Their clear, cool skin is like wine to the eyes, / The lines of their fluent limbs run like a song, / And every step is a note of grace which the frock repeats.
Don't you think it a pity, and greatly to be deplored / That these should lose this beauty, / And pass from it to the guile and trickery of woman?