The Glass of Beer,
by James Kenneth Stephens
The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:
May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.
That parboiled imp, with the hardest jaw you will ever see
On virtue’s path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,
Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,
And threw me out of the house on the back of my head.
If I asked her master he’d give me a cask a day;
But she with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!
May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.
He was a King's Scholar at Eton, where he proved to be a highly competent player of the Eton Wall Game; and then went up to King's College, Cambridge, again as a King's Scholar... Stephen became a published poet, his work being identified by the initials J. K. S. His collections of poems Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa Tendis were both published in 1891. Rudyard Kipling called him "that genius" and told how he "dealt with Haggard and me in some stanzas which I would have given much to have written myself" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kenneth_Stephen).
"Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it," said the Philosopher.
James Kenneth Stephens (1882-1950), Irish poet, author. The Crock of Gold, ch. 4 (1912) (www.poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=james%20kenneth%20stephens).
