A Handy Guide for Beggars: Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity / Being Sundry Explorations, Made While Afoot and Penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These Adventures Convey and Illustrate the Rules of Beggary for Poets and Some Others.

Chapter 4: FOLLOW THE THISTLEDOWN

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About This Book

A series of episodic travel sketches and lyrical interludes records the narrator's afoot wanderings through Southern and Eastern states, combining practical rules for itinerant poets with vivid vignettes of hospitality, rejection, and small-town characters. Anecdotes range from freight-ride adventures and mountain baths to encounters with moonshiners and kindly householders, set amid reflections on voluntary poverty, artistic devotion, and the Gospel of Beauty. Interspersed poems and allegorical passages punctuate the narrative, offering both comic episodes and earnest meditations on artistic pilgrimage and the ethics of begging.

FOLLOW THE THISTLEDOWN

I asked her “Is Aladdin’s Lamp

Hidden anywhere?”

“Look into your heart,” she said,

“Aladdin’s Lamp is there.”

She took my heart with glowing hands.

It burned to dust and air

And smoke and rolling thistledown,

Blowing everywhere.

“Follow the thistledown,” she said,

“Till doomsday if you dare,

Over the hills and far away.

Aladdin’s Lamp is there.”