The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI

Автор

Marshall Pinckney Wilder

Год написания книги

2019

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I am too winter-killed to live,
Cold-sour through and through.
O Heavenly Barber, come and give
My soul a dry shampoo!

I'm sick of all these nincompoops,
Who weep through yards of verse,
And all these sonneteering dupes
Who whine and froth and curse.

I'm sick of seeing my own name
Tagged to some paltry line,
While this old corpus without shame
Sits down to meat and wine.

I'm sick of all these Yellow Books,
And all these Bodley Heads;
I'm sick of all these freaks and spooks
And frights in double leads.

When good Napoleon's publisher
Was dangled from a limb,
He should have had an editor
On either side of him.

I'm sick of all this taking on
Under a foreign name;
For when you call it decadent,
It's rotten just the same.

I'm sick of all this puling trash
And namby-pamby rot,—
A Pegasus you have to thrash
To make him even trot!

An Age-end Art! I would not give,
For all their plotless plays,
One round Flagstaffian adjective
Or one Miltonic phrase.

I'm sick of all this poppycock
In bilious green and blue;
I'm tired to death of taking stock
Of everything that's "New."

New Art, New Movements, and New Schools,
All maimed and blind and halt!
And all the fads of the New Fools
Who can not earn their salt.

I'm sick of the New Woman, too.
Good Lord, she's worst of all.
Her rights, her sphere, her point of view,
And all that folderol!

She makes me wish I were the snake
Inside of Eden's wall,
To give the tree another shake,
And see another fall.

I'm very much of Byron's mind;
I like sufficiency;
But just the common garden kind
Is good enough for me.

I want to find a warm beech wood,
And lie down, and keep still;
And swear a little; and feel good;
Then loaf on up the hill,

And let the Spring house-clean my brain,
Where all this stuff is crammed;
And let my heart grow sweet again;
And let the Age be damned.

WASTED OPPORTUNITIES[6 - Lippincott's Magazine.]

BY ROY FARRELL GREENE

The lips I might have tasted, rosy ripe as any cherry,
How they pair off by the dozens when my memory goes back
Across the current of the years aboard of Fancy's ferry,
Which shuns the shores of What-We-Have and touches What-We-Lack.
The girl I took t' singin'-school one night, who vowed she'd never
Before walked with a feller 'thout her mother bein' by,
I reckon that her temptin' mouth will haunt my dreams forever,
The lips I might have tasted if I'd had the nerve t' try!

I recollect another girl, as chipper as a robin,
Who rode beside me in a sleigh one night through snow an' sleet,
An' both my hands I kept in use a guidin' good ol' Dobbin—
One didn't need them any mor'n a chicken needs four feet.
Too scared was I to hold her in, or warm her cheeks with kisses,—
I know, now, she expected it, for once I heard her sigh—
To-day I'd like t' kick myself for these neglected blisses,
The lips I might have tasted if I'd had the nerve t' try.

I never kissed Rebecca, she was sober as a Quaker,
I never kissed Alvira, though I took her home one night,