IT MUST BE ABOUT TIME.
Sir: The Federal Reserve bank at New Orleans has received a letter from a patriot who wants to know where and when he shall pay the interest on his Liberty bond. Rocky.
“In fact, I’ve finished—would you say a sonnet?”—concludes H. G. H., to whom we recommend the remark of James Stephens: “Nobody is interested in the making of sonnets, not even poets.”
Referring to the persons who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman Douglas wrote: “I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of these bards.… And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single instant, at the altar of some generous ideal.”
[p 254]
]The trouble with minor poets is well set forth by Conrad Aiken in The Dial, who refers to the conclusions of M. Nicolas Kostyleff after a tentative study of the mechanism of poetic inspiration: “An important part in poetic creation, he maintains, is an automatic verbal discharge, along chains of association, set in motion by a chance occurrence.”
POETRY.
(Lord Dunsany.)
What is it to hate poetry? It is to have no little dreams and fancies, no holy memories of golden days, to be unmoved by serene midsummer evenings or dawn over wild lands, singing or sunshine, little tales told by the fire a long while since, glow-worms and briar rose; for of all these things and more is poetry made. It is to be cut off forever from the fellowship of great men that are gone; to see men and women without their halos and the world without its glory; to miss the meaning lurking behind the common things, like elves hiding in flowers; it is to beat one’s hands all day against the gates of Fairyland and to find that they are shut and the country empty and its kings gone hence.
Why is it that in nearly all decisions of the Supreme court the most interesting opinions are delivered by the dissenting justices?
[p 255]
]“New Jack-a-Bean dining room furniture, used two months; will sell cheap.”—El Paso Herald.
That is the kind that Louis Canns has his apartment furnished with.
A CHANGE FROM LATIN ROOTS.
[From the Reedsburg, Wis., Free Press.]
Miss Edna White resumed her school duties after a week’s vacation for potato digging.
OUR FAVORITE AUTUMN POEM.
(By a New Jersey poetess.)
Autumn is more beautiful, I think,
Than Spring or Winter are.
For then trees change at the river’s brink—
How beautiful they are.
I love to see the different colors so bright—
That grow around brooks & grottoes.
Leaves that are pressed are a pleasant sight
To make photograph frames & mottoes.
Dr. Johnson or somebody said that a surgical operation was necessary to get a joke into a Scotchman’s head; but the Glasgow Herald, reporting the existence of a London detective named Leonard Jolly Death, conjectures that it was probably [p 256] />]an ancestor of his who was drowned in the butt of Malmsey wine.
One is usually mistaken in such matters, but we visualize Mr. Imer Pett, general manager of the Bingham Mines, in Salt Lake City, as quite otherwise.
THE SECOND POST.
[Received by a wholesale grocery house, from an Italian customer.]
Gentlemen: My wife wants me to suggest that you observe one of our Italian customs by remembering her with a bit of Christmas cheer. As she is the only wife I got I trust you will help me keep her. Joe.