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 9: THE WOULD-BE MERMAN

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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.

THE WOULD-BE MERMAN

Mobs are like the Gulf Stream,

Like the vast Atlantic.

In your fragile boats you ride,

Conceited folk at ease.

Far beneath are dancers,

Mermen wild and frantic,

Circling round the giant glowing

Sea-anemones.

“Crude, ill-smelling voters,—

Herds,” to you in seeming.

But to me their draggled clothes

Are scales of gold and red.

Ah, the pink sea-horses,

Green sea-dragons gleaming,

And knights that chase the dragons

And spear them till they’re dead!

Wisdom waits the diver

In the social ocean—

Rainbow shells of wonder,

Piled into a throne.

I would go exploring

Through the wide commotion,

Building under some deep cliff

A pearl-throne all my own.

Yesterday I dived there,

Grinned at all the roaring,

Clinging to the corals for a flash,

Defying death.

Mermen came rejoicing,

In procession pouring,

Yet I lost my feeble grip

And came above for breath.

I would be a merman.

Not in desperation

A momentary diver

Blue for lack of air.

But with gills deep-breathing

Swim amid the nation—

Finny feet and hands forsooth,

Sea-laurels in my hair.