"If youth only knew,
if age only could.”
O saddest of proverbs,
describing all the good

we squander early on
by being so crude
and later cannot get
for decrepitude

or weight of burdens.
What, no golden mean?
Perhaps just a sliver,
wedged in between.

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Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.



This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 32 Number 3, on page 27
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