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Veteran Sirens by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The ghost of Ninon would be sorry now
To laugh at them, were she to see them here,
So brave and so alert for learning how
To fence with reason for another year.
Age offers a far comelier diadem
Than theirs; but anguish has no eye for grace,
When time's malicious mercy cautions them
To think a while of number and of space.
The burning hope, the worn expectancy,
The martyred humor, and the maimed allure,
Cry out for time to end his levity,
And age to soften its investiture;
But they, though others fade and are still fair,
Defy their fairness and are unsubdued;
Although they suffer, they may not forswear
The patient ardor of the unpursued.
Poor flesh, to fight the calendar so long;
Poor vanity, so quaint and yet so brave;
Poor folly, so deceived and yet so strong,
So far from Ninon and so near the grave.
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There was an Old Man of the Wrekin by Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of the Wrekin,
Whose shoes made a horrible creaking;
But they said, 'Tell us whether,
Your shoes are of leather,
Or of what, you Old Man of the Wrekin?'
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Now List To My Morning's Romanza by Walt Whitman
Now list to my morning's romanza--I tell the signs of the Answerer;
To the cities and farms I sing, as they spread in the sunshine before
me.
A young man comes to me bearing a message from his brother;
How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother?
Tell him to send me the signs.
And I stand before the young man face to face, and take his right
hand in my left hand, and his left hand in my right hand,
And I answer for his brother, and for men, and I answer for him that
answers for all, and send these signs.
Him all wait for--him all yield up to--his word is decisive and
final,
Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves, as amid
light,
Him they immerse, and he immerses them.
Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape, people,
animals,
The profound earth and its attributes, and the unquiet ocean, (so
tell I my morning's romanza;)
All enjoyments and properties, and money, and whatever money will
buy,
The best farms--others toiling and planting, and he unavoidably
reaps,
The noblest and costliest cities--others grading and building, and he
domiciles there;
Nothing for any one, but what is for him--near and far are for him,
the ships in the offing,
The perpetual shows and marches on land, are for him, if they are for
any body.
He puts things in their attitudes;
He puts to-day out of himself, with plasticity and love;
He places his own city, times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and
sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest
never shame them afterward, nor assume to command them.
He is the answerer:
What can be answer'd he answers--and what cannot be answer'd, he
shows how it cannot be answer'd.
A man is a summons and challenge;
(It is vain to skulk--Do you hear that mocking and laughter? Do you
hear the ironical echoes?)
Books, friendships, philosophers, priests, action, pleasure, pride,
beat up and down, seeking to give satisfaction;
He indicates the satisfaction, and indicates them that beat up and
down also.
Whichever the sex, whatever the season or place, he may go freshly
and gently and safely, by day or by night;
He has the pass-key of hearts--to him the response of the prying of
hands on the knobs.
His welcome is universal--the flow of beauty is not more welcome or
universal than he is;
The person he favors by day, or sleeps with at night, is blessed.
Every existence has its idiom--everything has an idiom and tongue;
He resolves all tongues into his own, and bestows it upon men, and
any man translates, and any man translates himself also;
One part does not counteract another part--he is the joiner--he sees
how they join.
He says indifferently and alike, How are you, friend? to the
President at his levee,
And he says, Good-day, my brother! to Cudge that hoes in the sugar-
field,
And both understand him, and know that his speech is right.
He walks with perfect ease in the Capitol,
He walks among the Congress, and one Representative says to another,
Here is our equal, appearing and new.
Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic,
And the soldiers suppose him to be a soldier, and the sailors that he
has follow'd the sea,
And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an
artist,
And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them;
No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it, or has
follow'd it,
No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and
sisters there.
The English believe he comes of their English stock,
A Jew to the Jew he seems--a Russ to the Russ--usual and near,
removed from none.
Whoever he looks at in the traveler's coffee-house claims him,
The Italian or Frenchman is sure, and the German is sure, and the
Spaniard is sure, and the island Cuban is sure;
The engineer, the deck-hand on the great lakes, or on the
Mississippi, or St. Lawrence, or Sacramento, or Hudson, or
Paumanok Sound, claims him.
The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood;
The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see
themselves in the ways of him--he strangely transmutes them,
They are not vile any more--they hardly know themselves, they are so
grown.
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The Palace of Humbug by Lewis Carroll
Lays of Mystery,
Imagination, and Humor
Number 1
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls.
Faint odours of departed cheese,
Blown on the dank, unwholesome breeze,
Awoke the never ending sneeze.
Strange pictures decked the arras drear,
Strange characters of woe and fear,
The humbugs of the social sphere.
One showed a vain and noisy prig,
That shouted empty words and big
At him that nodded in a wig.
And one, a dotard grim and gray,
Who wasteth childhood's happy day
In work more profitless than play.
Whose icy breast no pity warms,
Whose little victims sit in swarms,
And slowly sob on lower forms.
And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,
Where flowers are growing wild and rank,
Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.
All birds of evil omen there
Flood with rich Notes the tainted air,
The witless wanderer to snare.
The fatal Notes neglected fall,
No creature heeds the treacherous call,
For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.
The wandering phantom broke and fled,
Straightway I saw within my head
A vision of a ghostly bed,
Where lay two worn decrepit men,
The fictions of a lawyer's pen,
Who never more might breathe again.
The serving-man of Richard Roe
Wept, inarticulate with woe:
She wept, that waiting on John Doe.
'Oh rouse', I urged, 'the waning sense
With tales of tangled evidence,
Of suit, demurrer, and defence.'
'Vain', she replied, 'such mockeries:
For morbid fancies, such as these,
No suits can suit, no plea can please.'
And bending o'er that man of straw,
She cried in grief and sudden awe,
Not inappropriately, 'Law!'
The well-remembered voice he knew,
He smiled, he faintly muttered 'Sue!'
(Her very name was legal too.)
The night was fled, the dawn was nigh:
A hurricane went raving by,
And swept the Vision from mine eye.
Vanished that dim and ghostly bed,
(The hangings, tape; the tape was red happy
'Tis o'er, and Doe and Roe are dead!
Oh, yet my spirit inly crawls,
What time it shudderingly recalls
That horrid dream of marble halls!
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