The archy poems by Don Marquis.

Harry

Here you go, Clive.


"YOU are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head --
Do you think, at your age, it is right?

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door --
Pray what is the reason for that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment -- one shilling a box --
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose --
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs.

Lewis Carroll

Although, I don't feel the least bit guilty about loving these.

If you want more: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acro.../carrol01.html

The Knights Tale is there too.
"...And now, if e'er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe,..."

Roger, why not post Casey?

------------------
Sharon P.
http://www.fischerpassmoredesign.com



[This message has been edited by momdebomb (edited October 03, 2001).]

I agree, Harry -- especially "the lesson of the moth"

Thanks for the delightful posts, Sharon!

Lilith

Spike Milligan wonderfully stupid verse:

I must go down to the sea again,
the lonely sea and the sky,
I left my shoes and socks there,
I wonder if they're dry?

Or:

The boy stood on the burning deck,
twit.


Steven Waling

[This message has been edited by SteveWal (edited October 01, 2001).]

I like Kipling! I like If and many of the didactic poems I grew up memorizing. One of my all-time favorites is this one:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
We found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hope that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighnbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children ad the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work, you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four--
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man--
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began--
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Rudyard Kipling

Carol, thanks for posting! That is not one I know, and certainly a very interesting piece. (A copybook, for those who might be puzzled, was a sort of primer from which one copied out proverbs and aphorisms to practice writing--I think?)

I like Kipling too, and was not meaning to cast aspersions on "If" by suggesting its inclusion here--merely its being decidedly out of the fashion, though an ever-green favorite. Kipling I think deserves his own thread on this board, and I'll try get around to it in the coming weeks.

Alicia, I think the copybook is the leather-bound ledger into which the green-eye-shaded accountant copies his columns of figures. I believe Mezey posted this long since, and we had a spirited discussion of Kipling, who is shamefully ignored. Younger members may not know this stricken verse from Auden's elegy for Yeats:

Time, that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling for his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons them for writing well.

Of course there is a wing of the Spherians who regard Kipling and Claudel as right-thinking "classical liberals," and regard Auden as a squishy leftist, however superb a poet he was.

Alicia's right about at least one kind of copybook--the kind Kipling's poem refers to. In my mother's day school children had copybooks to practice handwriting by copying out proverbs like "Do unto others..." and "The love of money is the root of all evil" and "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise." Since they used ink, they had to be careful not to blot their copybooks, since neatness and perfect penmanship were essential attributes in scholars. Girls made samplers with those sayings on them to learn embroidery. Copybooks were slightly before my time, but I do know that "The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog," which I learned on a manual Remington typewriter. Ugh!

Carol

Yes, a marvelous poem, Carol, one of his
best. I posted it (maybe on Musing) many
months back, and if memory serves, there
was little or no response to it. Maybe it
needs none---it says what it has to say as
completely and perfectly as it can be said.