“O argent-browed Sarcophagus,
That looms so through the ethered trees,
Why dost thou seem to those of us
Who drink the poisoned chalice on our knees
So distant and so empyrean,
So dour yet full of mystery?
Hast thou the oracle as yet unseen
To guide thy fell misogyny?
“Nay, let the spirit of the age
With all its mystic beauty stand
Translucent ever, aye, in spite the rage
Of Cossack and of Samarcand!
Thou art enough for any soul’s desire!
Thou hast the beauty of cerulean fire!
But we who grovel on the damask earth
Are we despoilt of thy exigeant mirth?
“Canst listen to a prayer, Sarcophagus?
Indeed O art thou there, Sarcophagus?
What time the Philistine denies,
What time the raucous cynic cries,
Avaunt, yet spare! Let this thy motto be,
With thy thesaurian verbosity.
Nor think that I, a caterpillian worm,
Before thy glance should ever honk or squirm.
“’Tis but the stern condition of the poor
That panting brings me pottering at thy door,
To breathe of love and argent charity
For thee, for thee, iguanodonic thee!”
“That’s an excellent specimen of magazine poetry,” said Billy Jones. “But I observe, Haarley, that you haven’t given it a title. Perhaps if you gave it a title we might get at the mystery of its meaning. A title is a sort of Baedeker to the general run of magazine poems.”
Haarlem grew rather red of countenance as he answered, “Well, I didn’t exactly like to give it the title I dreamed; it didn’t seem to shed quite as much light on the subject as a title should.”
“Still, it may help,” said Huddy Rivers. “I read a poem in a magazine the other day on ‘Mystery.’ And if it hadn’t had a title I’d never have understood it. It ran this way:
“Life, what art thou? Whence springest thou?
The past, the future, or the now?
Whence comes thy lowering lunacy?
Whence comes thy mizzling mystery?
Hast thou a form, a shape, a lineament?
Hast thou a single seraph-eyed medicament
To ease our sorrow and our twitching woe?
Hast thou one laudable Alsatian glow
To compensate, commensurate, and condign
For all these dastard, sleekish qualms of mine?
Hast thou indeed an abject agate plot
To show that what exists is really not?
Or art thou just content to sit and say
Life’s but a specious, coral roundelay?”
“I committed the thing to memory because it struck me as being a good thing to remember—it was so full of good phrases. ‘Twitching woe,’ for instance, and ‘sleekish qualms,’” he continued.
“Quaking qualms would have been better,” put in Tenafly Paterson, who judged poetry from an alliterative point of view.
“Nevertheless, I liked sleekish qualms,” retorted Huddy. “Quaking qualms might be more alliterative, but sleekish qualms is less commonplace.”
“No doubt,” said Tenafly. “I never had ’em myself, so I’ll take your word for it. But what do you make out of ‘coral roundelay’?”