Today’s Poem: A Certain Young Lady

You know very well whom I mean

Erastus Salisbury Field, Margaret Gilmore, c. 1845 (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Certain Young Lady

by Washington Irving

There’s a certain young lady,
Who’s just in her heyday,
  And full of all mischief, I ween;
So teasing! so pleasing!
Capricious! Delicious!
  And you know very well whom I mean.

With an eye dark as night,
Yet than noonday more bright,
  Was ever a black eye so keen?
It can thrill with a glance,
With a beam can entrance,
  And you know very well whom I mean.

With a stately step — such as
You’d expect in a duchess —
  And a brow might distinguish a queen,
With a mighty proud air,
That says “touch me who dare,”
  And you know very well whom I mean.

With a toss of the head
That strikes one quite dead,
  But a smile to revive one again;
That toss so appalling!
That smile so enthralling!
  And you know very well whom I mean.

Confound her! devil take her! —
A cruel heart-breaker —
  But hold! see that smile so serene.
God love her! God bless her!
May nothing distress her!
  You know very well whom I mean.

Heaven help the adorer
Who happens to bore her,
  The lover who wakens her spleen;
But too blest for a sinner
Is he who shall win her,
  And you know very well whom I mean.
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If we don’t think of Washington Irving (1783–1859) as a poet, that’s because poet is one of the few things Irving didn’t try to be. Travel writer, biographer, diplomat, editor, copyright-law pioneer, master of the art of social networking: Irving was all of these. His international array of friends included Charles Dickens, John Jacob Astor, and the young Queen Isabella of Spain.