et shams,
Her beauty no boon of arsenical balms,
And she weighs just sixty-two kilograms
To a deci-decimal fraction.

Her hair is a crown, I can truthfully state
'Tis a metre long, nor curly nor straight,
And it is as yellow as plumbic chromate
In a slightly acid solution.

And when she speaks from parlor or stump,
The words which gracefully gambol and jump
Sound sweet like the water in Sprengel's pump
In magnesic phosphate ablution.

I have bought me a lot, about a hectare,
And have built me a house ten metres square,
And soon, I think, I shall take her there,
My tart little acid radicle.

Perhaps little sailors on life's deep sea
Will be the salts of this chemistry,
And the lisp of the infantile A, B, C
Be the refrain of this madrigal.

No one but a scientific man can have any idea of the real nature of
love. The poet may dream, the novelist describe the familiar feeling,
but only the chemist knows just how it is:

A biochemist loved a maid
In pure actinic ways;
The enzymes of affection made
A ferment of his days.

The waves emergent from her eyes
Set symphonies afloat,
These undulations simply struck
His fundamental note.

No longer could he hide his love,
Nor cultures could he make,
And so he screwed his courage up,
And thus to her he spake:

"Oh, maid of undulations sweet,
Inoculate my veins,
And fill my thirsty arteries up
With amorous ptomaines.

"In vain I try to break this thrall,
In vain my reason fights,
My inner self tempestuous teems
With microcosmic mites.

"I cannot offer you a crown
Of gold--I cannot tell
Of terrapin or wine for us,
But rations balanced well.

"A little fat just now and then,
Some carbohydrates sweet,
And gluten in the bakers' bread,
Are what we'll have to eat.

"The days will pass in rapture by,
With antitoxine frills,
And on our Guinea-pigs we'll try
The cures for all our ills.

"O! maiden fair, wilt thou be mine?
Come, give me but one kiss,
And dwell forever blessed with me.
In symbiotic bliss."

This maiden, modest, up-to-date,
Eschewed domestic strife;
In mocking accents she replied,
"Wat t'ell--not on your life."

The philosopher and the theologian pretend to understand the origin of
things and the foundation of ethics, but what one of them ever had the
least idea