(March 4, 1913)
Thine aid, O Muse, I consciously beseech;
I crave thy succour, ask for thine assistance
That men may cry: "Some little ode! A peach!"
O Muse, grant me the strength to go the distance!
For odes, I learn, are dithyrambs, and long;
Exalted feeling, dignity of theme
And complicated structure guide the song.
(All this from Webster's book of high esteem.)
Let complicated structure not becloud
My lucid lines, nor weight with overloading.
To Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth and that crowd
I yield the bays for ground and lofty oding.
Mine but the task to trace a country's growth,
As evidenced by each inauguration
From Washington's to Wilson's primal oath—
In these U. S., the celebrated nation.
But stay! or ever that I start to sing,
Or e'er I loose my fine poetic forces,
I ought, I think, to do the decent thing,
To wit: give credit to my many sources:
Barnes's "Brief History of the U. S. A.,"
Bryce, Ridpath, Scudder, Fiske, J. B. McMaster,
A book of odes, a Webster, a Roget—
The bibliography of this poetaster.
Flow, flow, my pen, as gently as sweet Afton ever flowed!
An thou dost ill, shall this be still a poor thing, but mine ode.
G. W., initial prex,
Right down in Wall Street, New York City,
Took his first oath. Oh, multiplex
The whimsies quaint, the comments witty
One might evolve from that! I scorn
To mock the spot where he was sworn.
On next Inauguration Day
He took the avouchment sempiternal
Way down in Phil-a-delph-i-a,
Where rises now the L. H. Journal.
His Farewell Speech in '96
Said: "'Ware the Trusts and all their tricks!"
John Adams fell on darksome days:
March Fourth was blustery and sleety;
The French behaved in horrid ways
Until John Jay drew up a treaty.
Came the Eleventh Amendment, too,
Providing that—but why tell you?
T. Jefferson, one history showed,
Held all display was vain and idle;
Alone, unpanoplied, he rode;
Alone he hitched his horse's bridle.
No ball that night, and no carouse,
But back to Conrad's boarding house.
He tied that bridle to the fence
The morning of inauguration;
John Davis saw him do it; whence
Arose his "simple" reputation.
The White House, though, with Thomas J.,
Had chefs—and parties every day.