Re: So there you stand....
mere age has rendered your previous hilarious material to a mere damp squib
Which allows me to bring out my favourite depressing poem (can't remember who the Victorian author was but it's used in a song by a prog band called Cosmograf)
Growing Old
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone
Is it to feel our strength -
Not our bloom only, but our strength -decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact
Each nerve more weakly strung?
Yes, this, and more! but not
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow
A golden day's decline!
'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes
And heart profoundly stirred
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past
The years that are no more!
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain
It is to suffer this
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change
But no emotion - none
It is - last stage of all -
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man