without a head
Among them—eyeless, therefore, as the moles—
May wiser be than you, who damn their little souls!
If of two aged Southern gentlemen
Of equal need and worth, the one that tried
To cook the country’s goose—or say its hen—
Be blest with all the cheer we can provide,
And which to t’other sternly is denied
Because he didn’t, it will seem right queer.
The gods are logical and may deride.
Respect the Southern veteran, but fear
The laughter of Olympus sounding loud and clear!
Saith the Czar
My people come to me and make their moan:
“We starve, your Majesty—give us a stone.”
That’s flat rebellion!—how the devil dare
They starve right in my capital? Their prayer
For something in their bellies I will meet
With that which I’ll not trouble them to eat.
They ask for greater freedom. No, indeed—
What happened to my ancestor who freed
The serfs? His grateful subjects duly flung
Something that spoke to him without a tongue.
So he was sacrificed for Freedom’s sake,
And gathered to his fathers with a rake.
I from Autocracy my people free?
Ah, would to Heaven they could deliver me!
The Royal Jester
Once on a time, so ancient poets sing,
There reigned in Godknowswhere a certain king.
So great a monarch ne’er before was seen:
He was a hero, even to his queen,
In whose respect he held so high a place
That none was higher—nay, not even the ace.
He was so just his parliament declared
Those subjects happy whom his laws had spared;
So wise that none of the debating throng
Had ever lived to prove him in the wrong;
So good that Crime his anger never feared,
And Beauty boldly plucked him by the beard;
So brave that if his army got a beating
None dared to face him when he was retreating.
This monarch kept a Fool to make his mirth,
And loved him tenderly despite his worth.
Prompted by what caprice I cannot say,
He called the Fool before the throne one day
And to that minion seriously said:
“I’ll abdicate, and you shall reign instead,
While I, attired in motley, will make sport
To entertain your Majesty and Court.”
’Twas done and the Fool governed. He decreed
The time of harvest and the time of seed;
Ordered the rains and made the weather clear,
And had a famine every second year;
Altered the calendar to suit his freak,
Ordaining six whole holidays a week;
Religious creeds and sacred books prepared;
Made war when angry and made peace when scared.
New taxes he imposed; new laws he made;
Drowned those who broke them, who observed them, flayed.
In short, he ruled so well that all who’d not
Been starved, decapitated, hanged or shot
Made the whole country with his praises ring,
Declaring he was every inch a king;
And the High Priest averred ’twas very odd
If one so competent were not a god.
Meantime, his master, now in motley clad,
Wore such a visage, woeful, wan and sad,
That some condoled with him as with a brother
Who, having lost a wife, had got another.
Others, mistaking his profession, often
Approached him to be measured for a coffin.
For years this highborn Jester never broke
The silence—he was pondering a joke.
At last, one day, in cap-and-bells arrayed,
He strode into the Council and displayed
A long, bright smile, that glittered in the gloom
Like a gilt epitaph within a tomb.
Posing his bauble like a leader’s staff,
To give the signal when (and why) to laugh,
He brought it down with peremptory stroke
And simultaneously cracked his joke!
I can’t repeat it, friends. I ne’er could school
Myself to quote from any other fool:
A jest, if it were worse than mine, would start
My tears; if better, it would break my heart.
So, if you please, I’ll hold you but to state
That royal Jester’s melancholy fate.
The insulted nation, so the story goes,
Rose as one man—the very dead arose,
Springing indignant from the riven tomb,
And babes unborn leapt swearing from the womb!
All to the Council Chamber clamoring went,
By rage distracted and on vengeance bent.
In that vast hall, in due disorder laid,
The tools of legislation were displayed,
And the wild populace, its wrath to sate,
Seized them and heaved them at the Jester’s pate.
Mountains of writing paper; pools and seas
Of ink, awaiting, to become decrees,
Royal approval—and the same in stacks
Lay ready for attachment, backed with wax;
Pens to make laws, erasers to amend them;
With mucilage convenient to extend them;
Scissors for limiting their application,
Trash-baskets to repeal all legislation—
These, flung as missiles till the air was dense,
Were most offensive weapons of offense,
And by their aid the man was nigh destroyed.
They ne’er had been so harmlessly employed.
Whelmed underneath a load of legal cap,
His mouth regurgitating ink on tap,
His eyelids mucilaginously sealed,
His fertile head by scissors made to yield
Abundant harvestage of ears, his pelt,
In every wrinkle and on every welt,
Quickset with pencil-points from feet to gills
And thickly studded with a pride of quills,
The royal Jester in the dreadful strife
Was made (in short) an editor for life!
An idle tale, and yet a moral lurks
In this as plainly as in greater works.
I shall not give it birth: one moral here
Would die of loneliness within a year.
A Career in Letters
When Liberverm resigned the chair
Of This or That in college, where
For two decades he had gorged his brain
With more than it could well contain,
In order to relieve the stress
He took to writing for the press.
Then Pondronummus said, “I’ll help
This mine of talent to devel’p:”
And straightway bought with coin and credit
The Thundergust for him to edit.
The great man seized the pen and ink
And wrote so hard he couldn’t think;
Ideas grew beneath his fist
And flew like falcons from his wrist.
His pen shot sparks all kinds of ways
Till all the rivers were ablaze,
And where the coruscations fell
Men uttered words I dare not spell.
Eftsoons with corrugated brow,
Wet towels bound about his pow,
Locked legs and failing appetite,
He thought so hard he couldn’t write.
His soaring fancies, chickenwise,
Came home to roost and wouldn’t rise.
With dimmer light and milder heat
His goose-quill staggered o’er the sheet,
Then dragged, then stopped; the finish came—
He couldn’t even write his name.
The Thundergust in three short weeks
Had risen, roared, and split its cheeks.
Said Pondronummus, “How unjust!
The storm I raised has laid my dust!”
When, Moneybagger, you have aught
Invested in a vein of thought,
Be sure you’ve purchased not, instead,
That salted claim, a bookworm’s head.
The
