Franklin P. Adams

LAMENT, O Muse, and heave a suspiration,

Make me an epicedium, a threne,

An ode to fit my humid lachrimation,

A dirge ultramarine!

For heavy I, and supercharged with woe,

On reading that the Astor House must go.

Thou noble inn where oft I (Crys of “Louder”)

Repaired to find a frugal bit of lunch;

Where grew the city’s only perfect chowder

And hot Jamaica punch—

So deep my woe that thou art to be razed

I question it can fittingly be phrazed.

Farewell, farewell! If Byron I may borrow—

I read of thee in many an Alger tome,

Unthinking that, in age and bowed with sorrow,

I’d spill to thee a pome;

Unknowing that some day I should deplore

The announcement that thou wert to be no more.

Yet though my trend be super-sentimental,

Thine end I truly do not mind a bit;

My grief for that is wholly incidental,

This is my woe, to wit:

The riveting and blasting that I hear—

Shades of the Woolworth tower!—another year!