"It'll do em good," laughed the Hatter. "A good brain storm may result in a few of them being struck. Come along, Miss Alice, and we'll show you our City Poets at work."
"I don't think I understand," said Alice. "What is a city poet?"
"He bears the same relation to Municipal Poetry that a White Wing bears to the Street Cleaning Department," explained the Hatter. "Two years ago the City took over all the Verse-making enterprises of Blunderland, appointed a Municipalaureat, otherwise a Commissioner of Public Verse, and started him along with a Department. He employs 16,743 poets who provide all the poetry that is consumed by our people. It has resulted in great good for everybody. Poetry is cheaper by eight cents a line than it used to be, and, as you may have guessed from what the March Hare has just said, we give larger measure than was the custom under the private ownership of Pegasus. Quatrains have been increased from four lines to twenty-three, and the old stingy fourteen-line sonnet has been enlarged to fifty-four lines. We have also passed an ordinance requiring that poems shall say what they mean, which is a vast improvement on the old private control method whereunder anybody was allowed to write rhymes which nobody could understand—like that thing of Miss Arethusa Spink's, for instance, called Aspiration. Remember that?"
"I don't think I ever heard it," said Alice.
"Well it went this way," said the Hatter, and striking a graceful attitude he recited the following lines called:
ASPIRATION
By Arethusa Spink
Down by the purple opalescent sea,
Flung like a ribbon limp athwart the sky,
A rose lay blooming on the restless lea,
While sundry birds came chattering sweetly by.
'Twas then my soul that all too long had slept,
Awoke from out its iridescent nap,
crept
Down where the pink-cheeked crocus blossoms
From out fair Nature's over-bounteous lap,
And cried aloud "Alas! What hath betode?
What dream is this that like the ambient brook
Forbids the mind to face the solemn goad
And know itself forsook!"
The Hatter paused.
"Well?" said Alice, slightly puzzled.