With my fine tuned sense of what's dramatic
and a flair for the broadly histrionic
from the time that I was but embryonic
you could not have described me as phlegmatic .

Cheerfully sanguine throughout my youth ,
I casually accepted what came my way
whether it was part of work or play.
I rarely bothered to seek a truth .

Predisposed by lines generic
to fight against authority's bounds
on all and every possible grounds
my middle years became choleric.

But the passing of years has slowed my frolic:
the old bones ache and the old joints creak
so that day by day and week by week
I find myself much more melancholic.

But where the humours are concerned
I have through all of them traversed,
laughed and wept and blessed and cursed,
and from them , have a little learned .