id="a-single-termer" epub:type="z3998:poem">
A Single Termer
When Senator Foraker came to die
His features lit up with a glow,
And he said: “I am going to dwell on high
And the Democrats down below.
“I have kept the faith, I have fought the fight,
To the Trusts forever true.
With Elkins to lead, I have followed the light—
Saint Peter, it’s up to you.”
Said Peter: “We strive to please in vain;
Many a soul coming here
Escapes to earth to be born again
And resume the old career.”
Here he opened the gate. “Although, no doubt,
This fellow’s a son of sin.
The devil himself can’t keep him out.
But I’ll lock the fine gentleman in.”
A Plague of Asses
Alas, we’ve fallen upon an evil time,
Our journals are all in a rash of rhyme.
Slang, “dialect,” the humor of the slum,
Done into stanzas by the rule of thumb,
The peasant word, the coarse, colloquial phrase,
Fitting the pauper thought that it conveys,
March to the meter-master’s “hep, hep, hep,”
With every second soldier out of step.
What sins of ours deserve this heavy curse?
Who taught our clowns ’tis easy to write verse
If neither poetry nor wit be deemed
A needful ornament, nor sense esteemed
A twin of sound? O rustics of the quill,
Ill-made by Nature, making others ill,
(Landlubbers on the sea of song a-sail
Uttering your fancies o’er the leeward rail)
Forgive the wicked wish I cannot choose
But entertain—that, luckless, you may lose
Each one a thumb of the tormenting ten
Whereon you reckon syllables. Ah, then,
Restored to what it was before you learned
That grinning through horse-collars ever earned
Plaudits of rustics and enough of dollars
To pay the weekly rental of the collars,
With something over for the stomach’s throes,
Your ailing verse will turn to ailing prose.
Then joyous angels will look down and say:
“Behold! the ninety-nine that went astray
Return to where, from fields of noxious grass,
Sweet thistles beckon each repenting ass.”
In Cuba
Our Administration
Had made a new nation—
As new as a nation could be.
A raven was flapping
Above it and snapping
His beak with a manifest glee.
“O raven, what is it you see
That causes the manifest glee?
“You can’t be designing
A programme of dining
On anything living and free.
You’re famous for dinners
That plain-speaking sinners
Condemn with the Terrible D!
(The word is abhorrent to me
That begins with the Terrible D.)
“Come down from your airy
Position and tarry
Awhile on this coconut tree,
And tell me what joying
You find in annoying
A nation so young and so free—
Not dead in the slightest degree,
But lively and healthy as we.”
The raven, complying,
Said, solemnly eying
My edible parts from the tree:
“It isn’t to nations
I look for my rations
To any extent or degree.
They don’t fill the hollow in me
To an appreciable degree.
“Yet the seasons ensuing
Will see something doing
To heighten my manifest glee.
’Tis soldiers that mostly
Appeal to my ghostly
Unusual appetite, see?
They’re easy digesting to me
With my singular appetite, see?”
Then I hammered my forehead
To think of that horrid
Old bird with his appetite free,
A-sitting there, lacking
Compassion and cracking
His beak, on a coconut tree,
As if merely saying to me:
“Oh, what a fine coconut tree.”
I said somewhat later:
“Our Administrator
Of Freedom’s estate, O see!
His Administration
Presents us a ‘nation’
That’s spelled with the Terrible D!
And ‘nation’ is hateful to me
When led by the Terrible D.”
For a Certain Critic
Let lowly theme engage my humble pen—
Stupidities of critics, not of men.
Be it mine once more the maunderings to trace
Of the expounders’ self-directed race—
Their wire-drawn fancies, finically fine,
Of diligent vacuity the sign.
Let them in jargon of their trade rehearse
The moral meaning of the random verse
That runs spontaneous from the poet’s pen
To be half-blotted by ambitious men
Who hope with his their meaner names to link
By writing o’er it in another ink
The thoughts unreal which they think they think,
Until the mental eye in vain inspects
The hateful palimpsest to find the text.
The lark ascending heavenward, loud and long
Sings to the dawning day his wanton song.
The moaning dove, attentive to the sound,
Its hidden meaning hastens to expound:
Explains its principles, design—in brief,
Pronounces it a parable of grief!
The bee, just pausing ere he daubs his thigh
With pollen from a hollyhock near by,
Declares he never heard in terms so just
The labor problem thoughtfully discussed!
The browsing ass looks up and clears his whistle
To say: “A monologue upon the thistle!”
Meanwhile the lark, descending, folds his wing
And innocently asks: “What!—did I sing?”
O literary parasites! who thrive
Upon the fame of better men, derive
Your sustenance by suction, like a leech,
And, for you preach of them, think masters preach—
Who find it half is profit, half delight,
To write about what you could never write—
Consider, pray, how sharp had been the throes
Of famine and discomfiture in those
You write of if they had been critics, too,
And doomed to write of nothing but of you!
Lo! where the gaping crowd throngs yonder tent,
To see the lion resolutely bent!
The prosing showman who the beast displays
Grows rich and richer daily in its praise.
But how if, to attract the curious yeoman,
The lion owned the show and showed the showman?
To a Summer Poet
Yes, the Summer girl is flirting on the beach,
With a him.
And the damboy is a-climbing for the peach,
On the limb;
Yes, the bullfrog is a-croaking
And the dudelet is a-smoking
Cigarettes;
And the hackman is a-hacking
And the showman is a-cracking
Up his pets;
Yes, the Jersey ’skeeter flits along the shore
And the snapdog—we have heard it o’er and o’er;
Yes, my poet,
Well we know it—
Know the spooners how they spoon
In the bright
Dollar light
Of the country tavern moon;
Yes, the caterpillars fall
From the trees (we know it all),
And with beetles all the shelves
Are alive.
Please unbuttonhole us—O,
Have the grace to let us go,
For we know
How you Summer poets thrive,
By the recapitulation
And insistent iteration
Of the wondrous doings incident to Life Among Ourselves!
So, I pray you stop the fervor and the fuss.
For you, poor human linnet,
There’s a half a living in it,
But there’s not a copper cent in it for us!
Arthur McEwen
Posterity with all its eyes
Will come and
