Page 68 - Poetry-Books

Cheering Outlook for the Editor

Dear friends and fellow-writers, send we our verse no more;
The editor’s strange blindness we long enough deplore.

Come, ye whose wounded spirits with disappointment burn,
Strike! Let us strike! for even the goaded worms will turn.

Send not your verse in winter, his thoughts are full of care;
The closing year and opening year bring all his mind can bear.

Send not your verse in springtime, lest, like the king of Spain,
Your poem should go marching forth, and then march back again;

For while our hearts beat blithely with lambkins, buds, and birds,
Above his pile of poems he mutters, “Words, words, words!”

Send not your verse in summer, he’s gone north, east, or west;
Vacation is as much for him as those who need the rest.

Or if within his office the seething hours are spent,
He cares less for Apollo’s flights than Mercury’s ascent.

Send not your verse in autumn, he’ll greet it with a frown,
Such hopeless heaps await him on his return to town.

Come join, ye fellow-writers, in answer to my call,
In one vast vigintillion and send no verse at all;

And leave him, sadly jingling his overloaded purse,
To meet December’s issue with not a line of verse!

— Charlotte W. Thurston (Century Magazine, 1892)

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