The Iconoclastic Rustic And The Apropos Acorn

Reposing 'neath some spreading trees,
A populistic bumpkin
Amused himself by offering these
Reflections on a pumpkin:
'I would not, if the choice were mine,
Grow things like that upon a vine,
For how imposing it would be
If pumpkins grew upon a tree.'

Like other populists, you'll note,
Of views enthusiastic,
He'd learned by heart, and said by rote
A creed iconoclastic;
And in his dim, uncertain sight
Whatever wasn't must be right,
From which it follows he had strong
Convictions that what was, was wrong.

As thus he sat beneath an oak
An acorn fell abruptly
And smote his nose: whereat he spoke
Of acorns most corruptly.
'Great Scott!' he cried. 'The Dickens!' too,
And other authors whom he knew,
And having duly mentioned those,
He expeditiously arose.

Then, though with pain he nearly swooned,
He bathed his organ nasal
With arnica, and soothed the wound
With extract of witch hazel;
And surely we may well excuse
The victim if he changed his views:
'If pumpkins fell from trees like that,'
He murmured, 'Where would I be at?'

Of course it's wholly clear to you
That when these words he uttered
He proved conclusively he knew
Which side his bread was buttered;
And, if this point you have not missed,
You'll learn to love this populist,
The only one of all his kind
With sense enough to change his mind.

THE MORAL: In the early spring
A pumpkin-tree would be a thing
Most gratifying to us all,
But how about the early fall?

How Jack Found That Beans May Go Back On A Chap

Without the slightest basis
For hypochondriasis
A widow had forebodings
which a cloud around her flung,
And with expression cynical
For half the day a clinical
Thermometer she held
beneath her tongue.

Whene'er she read the papers
She suffered from the vapors,
At every tale of malady
or accident she'd groan;
In every new and smart disease,
From housemaid's knee to heart disease,
She recognized the symptoms
as her own!

She had a yearning chronic
To try each novel tonic,
Elixir, panacea, lotion,
opiate, and balm;
And from a homeopathist
Would change to an hydropathist,
And back again,
with stupefying calm!

She was nervous, cataleptic,
And anemic, and dyspeptic:
Though not convinced of apoplexy,
yet she had her fears.
She dwelt with force fanatical
Upon a twinge rheumatical,
And said she had a
buzzing in her ears!

Now all of this bemoaning
And this grumbling and this groaning
The mind of Jack, her son and heir,
unconscionably bored.
His heart completely hardening,
He gave his time to gardening,
For raising beans was
something he adored.

Each hour in accents morbid
This limp maternal bore bid
Her callous son affectionate
and lachrymose good-bys.
She never granted Jack a day
Without some long 'Alackaday!'
Accompanied by
rolling of the eyes.

But Jack, no panic showing,
Just watched his beanstalk growing,
And twined with tender fingers
the tendrils up the pole.
At all her words funereal
He smiled a smile ethereal,
Or sighed an absent-minded
'Bless my soul!'

That hollow-hearted creature
Would never change a feature:
No tear bedimmed his eye, however
touching was her talk.
She never fussed or flurried him,
The only thing that worried him
Was when no bean-pods
grew upon the stalk!

But then he wabbled loosely
His head, and wept profusely,
And, taking out his handkerchief
to mop away his tears,

Exclaimed: 'It hasn't got any!'
He found this blow to botany
Was sadder than were all
his mother's fears.

The Moral is that gardeners pine
Whene'er no pods adorn the vine.
Of all sad words experience gleans
The saddest are: 'It might have beans.'
(I did not make this up myself:
'Twas in a book upon my shelf.
It's witty, but I don't deny
It's rather Whittier than I!)

Magician hands through long, laborious nights
Have made these princely palaces to loom
Whiter than are the city's legion lights,
On threads unseen stretched out across the gloom.
Reared in an hour, for one brief hour to reign,
The proud pavilions watchful hold in fee
A world's achievements, where the stately Seine
Slides slowly past her bridges to the sea.

Mute and memorial, as on either bank
She sees the marvel worked before her eyes,
Beholds as in a vision, rank on rank,
Pagoda, dome, and campanile rise,
Like to a mother scowling on a child
Sceptred and crowned to make a queen of May,
The Seine, that sorrowed not for France defiled,
Past France triumphant frowning goes her way.

Yet, dragged reluctant from these ransomed shores,
Upon her tide, that sullenly and slow
Creeps channelward, the unapparent scores
Of history's spectres disregarded go;
And as the Empress City gains the seat
Of that imperial throne to which at last
By devious ways she comes, beneath her feet
The Seine in silence blots away the past.

Blots out the warning of cathedral bells,
The night of snowy scarfs, of swords, of staves,
The muffled bass of tumbril wheels that tells
Of mortal men that dig immortal graves;
Blots out the faces, calmly unafraid,
Of prince and peasant, courtesan and queen,
When men made martyrs and were martyrs made,
When France meant Hell and God meant Guillotine!

Like pilgrims whom a holy city calls,
The peoples bring their miracles to her;
The world of peace lays down within her walls
Its gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh:
The West, wide-eyed, alert, intrepid, young,
With rush of shuttles and the song of steam;
The East, that, lotus-eating, gropes among
The half-remembered fragments of her dream.

From minarets the muezzins call to prayer,
From violins the mad mazurkas rise,
And western rangers watch in wonder, where
The camel boy his listless lash applies:
And nations warring, or that late have warred,
Their feuds forgot, their battles under ban,
Proclaim above the clamor of the sword
The pæan of the mastery of man.

Man! Born to grovel in a squalid cave,
Whose hand it is that every door unbars,
Whose cables cleave three thousand miles of wave,
Whose lenses tear their secrets from the stars!
Man! Naked, dull, unarmed, barbaric, dumb,
What magic path is this that he had trod?
Through what refining furnace hath he come,
This demi-brute become a demi-god?

As some great river merges every song
Of tributary waters in its own,
To blend in turn its music in the strong
Full measure of the ocean's monotone-
So this triumphant anthem, skyward sent
Man's marvellous finale to presage,
Within its thunderous diapason blent,
The keynote holds of each succeeding age!

For her the whip-lash sings above the slaves
Who bend despairing to the galley's oars;
The hoarse hail rings, across the sunlit waves,
Of vikings bound to unexploited shores:
Here is the chant of ransomed Israel's joy,
The moan of Egypt stricken in her home,
The challenge of the Grecian host to Troy,
The shout of Huns before the gates of Rome:

The oaths of sailors on the galleon's decks,
The welcome of Columbus to the land,
The prayers upon the doomed Armada's wrecks,
The rallying cry of Braddock's final stand;
Trafalgar's cannon, and the bugle's calls
Where France's armies thread the Alpine gorge,
The Campbell's pipes heard near to Lucknow's walls,
The patriot's hymn that hallowed Valley Forge!

All, all are here! The feeble and the strong;
The spoiled beside the victors of the spoil
Of twenty centuries swell the sacred song
Of human triumph won by human toil!
Up and yet upward to the heaven's wide arch
The thunders of the great thanksgiving roll
To mark the way of that majestic march
Of mortal man toward his Maker's goal!

And while the echo of her folly dies,
As in the hills the sound of village bells,
Upward from Paris to the April skies
Her hymn of rehabilitation swells;
From dark to dawn, from weakness back to strength,
The pendulum majestically swings,
And o'er the ashes of her past at length
The phoenix of her future spreads its wings!