Page 61 - Poetry-Whimsy

On a Sheepskin

Long since, when I groped in the darkness
Of languages ancient and dead,
With lessons from Hadley and Harkness
Served up between breakfast and bed.
When Xenophon, Caesar, and Sallust
Were vessels I tried hard to sail,
I’d no intellectual ballast
To baffle the blustering gale.

My grammars were dismally dry ones,
All full of bewildering rules;
My “ponies” were certainly shy ones,
And balked quite as badly as mules;
The tutors that taught me in college
Concluded—and wisely—at once,
‘Twere hopeless to try to make knowledge
Take root in the brains of a dunce.
Yet look; I possess a diploma
Conferring the proper degree—
A parchment whose musty aroma
Is very delightful to me.
But gorgeous in old English letter,
And in its mahogany frame,
‘Twould please me a thousand times better
If I could read more than my name.

— Idle Idyller (Harper’s Monthly, 1889)

The V-A-S-E

From the madding crowd they stand apart—
The maidens four and the Work of Art.

And none might tell, from sight alone,
In which had culture ripest grown.

The Gotham million fair to see.
The Philadelphia pedigree,

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