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 46: WHAT THE SEXTON SAID

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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.

WHAT THE SEXTON SAID

Your dust will be upon the wind

Within some certain years,

Though you be sealed in lead to-day

Amid the country’s tears.

When this idyllic churchyard

Becomes the heart of town,

The place to build garage or inn,

They’ll throw your tombstone down.

Your name so dim, so long outworn,

Your bones so near to earth,

Your sturdy kindred dead and gone,

How should men know your worth?

So read upon the runic moon

Man’s epitaph, deep-writ.

It says the world is one great grave.

For names it cares no whit.

It tells the folk to live in peace,

And still, in peace, to die.

At least, so speaks the moon to me,

The tombstone of the sky.