There, little girl, don't cry!
You are awfully broke, I know;
And of course you've spent
Far more than you meant,
And lots of bills you owe.
But at Christmas time one has to buy—
There, little girl, don't cry, don't cry!
The Re-Echo Club met in their pleasant rooms at No. 4, Poetic Mews. Spring had passed, so their fancy was lightly turning to other matters than Love, and it chanced to turn lightly to the Cubist Movement in Art.
"Of course," mused the President, rolling his eyes in an especially fine frenzy, "this movement will strike the poets next."
"Ha," said Dan Rossetti, refraining for a moment from the refrain he was building, "we must be ready for it."
"We must advance to meet it," said Teddy Poe, who was ever of an adventurous nature. "What's it all about?"
"The principles are simple," observed Rob Browning, glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; "in fact, it's much like my own work always has been. I was born cubic. You see, you just symbolize the liquefaction of the essence of an idea into its emotional constituents, and there you are!"
"Dead easy!" declared Lally Tennyson, who went out poeting by the day, and knew how to do any kind. "What's the subject?"
"That's just the point," said the President; "preeminently and exclusively it's subjective, and you must keep it so. On no account allow an object of any kind to creep in. Now, here's one of the Cubist pictures. They call it 'A Nude Descending the Staircase.' They pick names at random out of a hat, I believe. Take this, you fellows, and throw it into poetry."