Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

by Bill Nye

CHESTNUT-BURR NYE AS A CRITIC AND NYE AS A POET.

POETIC CHESTNUTS

The Poet of the Greeley Eye—The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher—A Mournful Stanza—Poems by Nye—Apostrophe to an Orphan Mule—Ode to Spring—The Picnic Snoozeds Lament—Ode to the Cucumber—Apostrophe to Oscar Wilde—An Adjustable Campaign Song—The Beautiful Snow.

A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.

Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.

Couched in the rough terms of the West, robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.

Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"

So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;

That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,

Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,