Have I no claim on thine affection?
Dost love the chill Illyrian wind
With something passing predilection?
And is thy friend—whoe'er he be—
The kind to take the place of me?
Canst thou endure the hard ship's-mattress?
For scant will be thy hours of sleep
From Staten Island to Cape Hatt'ras;
And won't thy fairy feet be froze
With treading on the foreign snows?
With billows twice as high as ever,
So that the captain, fain to sail,
May not achieve his mad endeavour!
The winds, when that they cease to roar,
Shall find me wailing on the shore.
O False, I pray that Galatea
May smile upon thy watery path!
A pleasant trip,—that's the idea.
Light of my life, there never shall
For me be any other gal.
Will always have to hear my query:
"Where have you seen my Cynthia last?
Has anybody seen my dearie?"
I'll shout: "In Malden or Marquette
Where'er she be, I'll have her yet!"
Fragment
"Militis in galea nidum fecere columbæ."—PETRONIUS
On the Uses of Adversity
"Nam nihil est, quod non mortalibus afferat usum."—PETRONIUS
What in our wealth we treasured, in our poverty we prize.
While on a simple oar a shipwrecked man may keep afloat.
After Hearing "Robin Hood"
Are lilac-sweet and clear;
The virile rhymes of merrier times
Sound fair upon mine ear.
And sweet their simple art.
The balladry of the greenwood tree
Stirs memories in my heart.
Maud Muller Mutatur
In 1909 toilet goods were not considered a serious matter and no special department of the catalogs was devoted to it. A few perfumes and creams were scattered here and there among bargain goods.
In 1919 an assortment of perfumes that would rival any city department store is shown, along with six pages of other toilet articles, including rouge and eyebrow pencils.
—From "How the Farmer Has Changed in a Decade: Toilet Goods," in Farm and Fireside's advertisement.
Powdered her nose with Bon Sachet.
Eyebrows and cheeks that were well veneered.
To the tune of "The Land of the Sky Blue Jazz."
And she said "This won't get me anywhere."
And signalled "Stop!" to his brave chauffeur.
Said Maud. Said the judge, "I'll say it is."
Have a drink?" said Maud. Said the judge, "You said it."
Blended some gin and some French vermouth.
"I've got something on Whittier's heroine."
From a fairer hand was never knew."
Maud seemed an angel direct from Heaven.
An' I'm for you, Maudie, I'll tell the worl'."
As she powders her nose with Bon Sachet,
If I'd waited till after the First o' July."
The Carlyles
[I was talking with a newspaper man the other day who seemed to think that the fact that Mrs. Carlyle threw a teacup at Mr. Carlyle should be given to the public merely as a fact.
But a fact presented to people without the proper—or even, if necessary, without the improper—human being to go with it does not mean anything and does not really become alive or caper about in people's minds.
But what I want and what I believe most people want when a fact is being presented is one or two touches that will make natural and human questions rise in and play about like this:
"Did a servant see Mrs. Carlyle throw the teacup? Was the servant an English servant with an English imagination or an Irish servant with an Irish imagination? What would the fact have been like if Mr. Browning had been listening at the keyhole? Or Oscar Wilde, or Punch, or the Missionary Herald, or The New York Sun, or the Christian Science Monitor?"—Gerald Stanley Lee in the Satevepost.]
BY OUR OWN ROBERT BROWNING
I listened at the Carlyles' keyhole;
And I saw, I, Robert Browning, saw,
Tom hurl a teacup at Jane's jaw.
She silent sat, nor tried to speak up
When came the wallop with the teacup—
A cup not filled with Beaune or Clicquot,
But one that brimmed with Orange Pekoe.
"Jane Welsh Carlyle," said Thomas, bold,
"The tea you brewed for m' breakfast's cold!
I'm feeling low i' my mind; a thing
You know b' this time. Have at you!"... Bing!
And hurled, threw he at her the teacup;
And I wrote it, deeming it unique, up.
BY OUR OWN OSCAR WILDE
Lady Leffingwell (coldly).—A full teacup! What a waste! So many good women and so little good tea.
[Exit Lady Leffingwell]
FROM OUR OWN "PUNCH"
A Manchester autograph collector, we are informed, has just offered £50 for the signature of Tea Carlyle.
FROM OUR OWN "MISSIONARY HERALD"
From what clouds cannot sunshine be distilled! When, in a fit of godless rage, Mr. Carlyle threw a teacup at the good woman he had vowed at the altar to love, honour, and obey, she smiled and the thought of China entered her head.
Yesterday Mrs. Carlyle enrolled as a missionary, and will sail for the benighted land of the heathen to-morrow.
FROM OUR OWN "NEW YORK SUN"
Fortunate is Mrs. Jane Welsh Carlyle to have escaped with her life, though if she had not, no American worthy of the traditions of Washington could simulate acute sorrow. Mr. Carlyle, wearied of the dilatory methods of the Bakerian War Department, properly took the law into his own strong hands.
The argument that resulted in the teacup's leaving Mr. Carlyle's hands was common in most households. It transpires that Mrs. Carlyle, with a Bolshevistic tendency that makes patriots wonder what the Department of Justice—to borrow a phrase from a newspaper cartoonist—thinks about, had been championing the British-Wilson League of Nations, that league which will make ironically true our "E Pluribus Unum"—one of many. Repeated efforts by Mr. Carlyle, in appeals to the Department of Justice, the Military Intelligence Division, and the City Government, were of no avail. And so Mr. Carlyle, like the red-blooded American he is, did what the authorities should have saved him the embarrassing trouble of doing.
FROM OUR OWN "CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR"
It is reported that Mr. Thomas Carlyle has thrown a teacup at Mrs. Carlyle, and much exaggerated and acrid comment has been made on this incident.
If it had been a whiskey glass, or a cocktail glass, the results might have been fatal. In Oregon, which went dry in 1916, the number of women hit by crockery has decreased 4.2 per cent in three years. Of 1,844 women in Oregon hit by crockery in 1915, 1,802 were hit by glasses containing, or destined to contain, alcoholic stimulants. More than 94 per cent of these accidents resulted fatally. The remaining 22 women, hit by tea or coffee cups, are now happy, useful members of society.
If Amy Lowell Had Been James Whitcomb Riley
A DECADE
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread—
Smooth and pleasant,
I hardly taste you at all, for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
—Amy Lowell, in The Chimæra.
She made me feel all jumpy, did that ol' sweetheart o' mine;
Wunst w'en I went to Crawfordsville, on one o' them there trips,
I kissed her—an' the burnin' taste wuz sizzlin' on my lips.
An' now I've married Annie, an' I see her all the time,
I do not feel the daily need o' bustin' into rhyme.
An' now the wine-y taste is gone, fer Annie's always there,
An' I take her fer granted now, the same ez sun an' air.
But though the honey taste wuz sweet, an' though the wine wuz strong,
Yet ef I lost the sun an' air, I couldn't git along.
If the Advertising Man Had Been Gilbert
The tire with a thousand claws will hold you.
Stop as quickly as you will—
Those thousand claws grip the road like a vise.
Turn as sharply as you will—
Those thousand claws take a steel-prong grip on the road to prevent a side skid.
You're safe—safer than anything else will make you—
Safe as you would be on a perfectly dry street.
And those thousand claws are mileage insurance, too.
advertisement in the Satevepost.
Never bother if the street is full of ooze;
Do not fret that you'll upset, that you will spoil your summer frippery,
You may turn about as sharply as you choose.
For those myriad claws will grip the road and keep the car from skidding,
And your steering gear will hold it fast and true;
Every atom of the car will be responsive to your bidding,
AND those thousand claws are mileage insurance, too—
Oh, indubitably,
Those thousand claws are mileage insurance, too.
If the Advertising Man Had Been Praed, or Locker
'Tis a fabric of subtle distinction.
For street wear it is superb.
The chic of the Rue de la Paix—
The style of Fifth Avenue—
The character of Regent Street—
All are expressed in this new fabric creation.
Leather-like but feather-light—
It drapes and folds and distends to perfection.
And it may be had in dull or glazed,
Plain or grained, basket weave or moiréd surfaces!
Subtly distinctive as a fabric fair;
Nor Keats nor Shelley in his loftiest ode
Could thrum the line to tell how it will wear.
The style that is Fifth Avenue, New York.
The character of Regent Street in May—
As leather strong, yet light as any cork.
(Light of my life, O thou my Genevieve!)
In surface dull or glazed it may be had—
In plain or grained, moiréd or basket weave.
Georgie Porgie
By Mother Goose and Our Own Sara Teasdale
Eddie's made me yearn to die,
Jimmie's made me laugh aloud,—
But Georgie's made me cry.
On First Looking into Bee Palmer's Shoulders
WITH BOWS TO KEATS AND KEITH'S
["The World's Most Famous Shoulders"]
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent upon a peak in Darien."
"Bee" Palmer has taken the raw, human—all too human—stuff of the underworld, with its sighs of sadness and regret, its mad merriment, its swift blaze of passion, its turbulent dances, its outlaw music, its songs of the social bandit, and made a new art product of the theatre. She is to the sources of jazz and the blues what François Villon was to the wild life of Paris. Both have found exquisite blossoms of art in the sector of life most removed from the concert room and the boudoir, and their harvest has the vigour, the resolute life, the stimulating quality, the indelible impress of daredevil, care-free, do-as-you-please lives of the picturesque men and women who defy convention.—From Keith's Press Agent.
And many goodly arms and shoulders seen
Quiver and quake—if you know what I mean;
I've seen a lot, as everybody has.
Some plaudits got, while others got the razz.
But when I saw Bee Palmer, shimmy queen,
I shook—in sympathy—my troubled bean,
And said, "This is the utter razmataz."
To a Vers Librist
The shackles that encumber me,
The fetters that are my obsession,
Are never gyves to your expression.
In metre, quantity, or time,
Is never yours; you sing along
Your unpremeditated song."
"Whatever pops into my head
I write, and have but one small fetter:
I start each line with a capital letter.
Are actually negligible.
I go ahead, like all my school,
Without a single silly rule."
He made me feel inconsequential.
I shed some strongly saline tears
For bards I loved in younger years.
I said, "he might have done good stuff.
If Burns had thrown his rhymes away,
His songs might still be sung to-day."
How Do You Tackle Your Work?
Are you scared of the job you find?
Do you grapple the task that comes your way
With a confident, easy mind?
Do you stand right up to the work ahead
Or fearfully pause to view it?
Do you start to toil with a sense of dread?
Or feel that you're going to do it?
But you'll never accomplish more;
If you're afraid of yourself, young man,
There's little for you in store.
For failure comes from the inside first,
It's there if we only knew it,
And you can win, though you face the worst,
If you feel that you're going to do it.
And not in the realm of luck!
The world will furnish the work to do,
But you must provide the pluck.
You can do whatever you think you can,
It's all in the way you view it.
It's all in the start that you make, young man:
You must feel that you're going to do it.
With confidence clear, or dread?
What to yourself do you stop and say
When a new task lies ahead?
What is the thought that is in your mind?
Is fear ever running through it?
If so, just tackle the next you find
By thinking you're going to do it.
With a fear that is well defined;
And I grapple the task that comes my way
With no confidence in my mind.
I try to evade the work ahead,
As I fearfully pause to view it,
And I start to toil with a sense of dread,
And doubt that I'm going to do it.
And I never accomplish more.
I am scared to death of myself, old man,
As I may have observed before.
I've read the proverbs of Charley Schwab,
Carnegie, and Marvin Hughitt;
But whenever I tackle a difficult job,
O gosh! how I hate to do it!
With that confident kind of bluff,
But somebody tells me The Conning Tower
Is nothing but awful stuff.
And I take up my impotent pen that night,
And idly and sadly chew it,
As I try to write something merry and bright,
And I know that I shall not do it.
Recuerdo
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
I had worked all day grinding out a column.
I came back from dinner at half-past seven,
And I couldn't think of anything till quarter to eleven;
And then I read "Recuerdo," by Miss Millay,
And I said, "I'll bet a nickel I can write that way."
On Tradition
LINES PROVOKED BY HEARING A YOUNG MAN WHISTLING
I worship at the shrine of Form;
Yet open are my mind and heart
To each departure from the norm.
When Post-Impressionism emerged,
I hesitated but a minute
Before I saw, though it diverged,
That there was something healthy in it.
Undid the chains that chafed her feet,
I grew to like discordant shade—
Unharmony I thought was sweet.
When verse divorced herself from sound,
I wept at first. Now I say: "Oh, well,
I see some sense in Ezra Pound,
And nearly some in Amy Lowell."
Unshackled Thoughts on Chivalry, Romance, Adventure, Etc.
walking on Worth Street,
A gust of wind blew my hat off.
I swore, petulantly, but somewhat noisily.
A young woman had been near, walking behind me;
She must have heard me, I thought.
And I was ashamed, and embarrassedly sorry.
So I said to her: "If you heard me, I beg your pardon."
But she gave me a frightened look
And ran across the street,
Seeking a policeman.
So I thought, Why waste five hours trying to versify the incident?
Vers libre would serve her right.
Results Ridiculous
("Humourists have amused themselves by translating famous sonnets into free verse. A result no less ridiculous would have been obtained if somebody had rewritten a passage from 'Paradise Lost' as a rondeau."—George Soule in the New Republic.)
"PARADISE LOST"
More smoothly than the wandering Po,
Of man's descending from the height
Of Heaven itself, the blue, the bright,
To Hell's unutterable throe.
That fell upon us here below
From man's pomonic primal bite—
Sing, Heavenly Muse!
Of future days, of long ago,
Of morning and "the shades of night,"
Of woman, "my ever new delight,"
Go to it, Muse, and put us joe—
Sing, Heavenly Muse!
"THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER"
He could not choose but hear
The mariner. They were there alone.
The wedding guest sat on a stone.
"I'll read you something of my own,"
Declared that mariner.
The wedding guest sat on a stone—
He could not choose but hear.
Regarding (1) the U. S. and (2) New York
I scoffed, in my provincial way,
At other lands; I deemed absurd
All nations but these U. S. A.
Before I was a travelled guy,
I laughed at, with unhidden scorn,
All cities but New York, N. Y.
Broadmindedness
How prejudiced all of his views!
How hard is the shell of his bigoted mind!
How difficult he to excuse!
The Jazzy Bard
Workin's makes me want to go on strike;
Sittin' in an office on a sunny afternoon,
Thinkin' o' nothin' but a ragtime tune.
I got the paragraphic blues.
Been a-sittin' here since ha' pas' ten,
Bitin' a hole in my fountain pen;
Brain's all stiff in the creakin' joints,
Can't make up no wheezes on the Fourteen Points;
Can't think o' nothin' 'bout the end o' booze,
'Cause I got the para—, I said the paragraphic, I mean the column conductin' blues.
Lines on and from "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations"
("Sir: For the first time in twenty-three years 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations' has been revised and enlarged, and under separate cover we are sending you a copy of the new edition. We would appreciate an expression of opinion from you of the value of this work after you have had an ample opportunity of examining it."—The Publishers.)
So Sancho Panza said, and so say I.
Thou wert my guide, philosopher and friend
When only one is shining in the sky.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
To be great is to be misunderstood,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans.
I never write as funny as I can.
Remote, unfriended, studious let me sit
And say to all the world, "This was a man!"
Thoughts in a Far Country
Whenever (as often) I hear
The palpitant strains of "The Star Spangled Banner,"—
I shout and cheer.
I jump to me feet with a "Whee!"
Whenever "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean"
Is played near me.
I'm hoarse for a couple of days—
You've heard me, I'm positive, joyously cheering
"The Marseillaise."
I whistle, I pound, and I stamp
Whenever an orchestra plays "Yankee Doodle,"
Or "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp."
When You Meet a Man from Your Own Home Town
A little song of the A. E. F.,
And pardon me, please, if I give vent
To something akin to sentiment.
But we have our moments Over Here
When we want to cry and we want to cheer;
And the hurrah feeling will not down
When you meet a man from your own home town.
Since you embarked from the U. S. A.,
And you met some men—it's a great big war—
From towns that you never had known before;
And you landed here, and your rest camp mate
Was a man from some strange and distant state.
Liked him? Yes; but you wanted to see
A man from the town where you used to be.
All over the well-known map of France;
And you yearned with a yearn that grew and grew
To talk with a man from the burg you knew.
And some lugubrious morning when
Your morale is batting about .110,
"Where are you from?" and you make reply,
And the O. D. warrior says, "So am I."
As you spill your talk of the old home place;
You talk of the streets, and the home town jokes,
And you find that you know each other's folks;
And you haven't any more woes at all
As you both decide that the world is small—
A statement adding to its renown
When you meet a man from your own home town.
You may be a Lieut. or a Major-Gen.;
Your home may be up in the Chilkoot Pass,
In Denver, Col., or in Pittsfield, Mass.;
You may have come from Chicago, Ill.,
Buffalo, Portland, or Louisville—
But there's nothing, I'm gambling, can keep you down,
When you meet a man from your own home town.