Page 69 - Poetry-Books

To the Lamp-Post!

Reviewers must live, one supposes,
For they most incontestably do.
They thrust out the thorns on our roses,
They teach us to turn up our noses,
They prove that far older than Moses—
Are the things we thought charmingly new.
Perhaps ‘t is all in their vocation,
Perhaps they would starve, did they not;
But one thing demands legislation,
One criminal, extermination,—
Or, at the least, expatriation,—
The reviewer who tells us the plot.

When life, though we patiently take it,
Is often so bitter a pill;
So acid a draught, though we shake it,
And strive effervescent to make it,
May we not, for a moment, forsake it
By losing ourselves in a thrill?
If mystery veil the last pages,
We can live in the heroine’s life,—
Or the hero’s,—can rage when he rages,
Can fight in the battle he wages,
And come, by his various stages,
Triumphantly out of the strife.

But when, before even beginning,
We know what the end is, how tame
Becomes the amusement—the spinning
And weaving employed for our winning
Seem visibly shrinking and thinning;
And for this is the author to blame?
No! Perish the heartless reviewer
Who mars that which make he could not!
Let him give, for the old, something newer;
Let him give, for the false, something truer;
Let each reader become his pursuer—
This wretch who betrayeth the plot!
— Margaret Vandegrift (Century Magazine, 1892)

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