Now April with sweet showers of freshening rain
Has roused last summer's vigorous breath once more;
'Tis in the air, the house, the street, the lane—
Puffs through the walls and oozes through the floor.
The rau-cous-throated frog ayont the sty
Sends forth, as erst, his amerous vermal croak,
Each hungry mooly casts her swivel eye
For pots and pails in which her nose to poke.
With gurgling glee the gutter gushes by,
Fraught all with filth, unknown and nameless dirt—
A dead green goose, an o'er-ripe rat I spy;
Head of a cat, tail of a flannel shirt.
The querulous cry of every gabbling goose
From thousand-scented mudholes echoes o'er;
The dogs and yawling cats have gotten loose
And mock the hideous howls of hell once more.
By yon scrub oak, where roots the sallow sow,
In where John Murphy's wife outpours her slop;
Right there you'll find there's almost stench now
To cause the world its nostrils to estop.
And yonder dauntless goat that bank adown,
That wreathes his old fantastic horns so high,
Gnaws sadly on the bustle of Miss Brown,
Which she discarded in the months gone by.
So in Goose Island cometh April round;
Full eagerly we watch the month's approach—
The season of sweet sight and pleasant sound,
The season of the bedbug and the roach.