"Oh, you may wait."
"Well, well, go your own way," said the whip, curling itself up like a corkscrew; it lay down in the road and began to think of other people. The poet went to an inn, ordered a bottle of beer, and began to think about himself.
"Although the whip was decidedly rude, the verse is poor again, that's true enough. How strange it is! One person always writes bad verse, while another sometimes succeeds in writing verse that is good. How badly everything is arranged in this world! What a stupid world it is!"
So he sat and drank, trying to arrive at a clearer conception of the world. He came to the conclusion at last that it was necessary to speak the truth. This world is good for nothing, and it really disgusts a man to live in it. He thought about an hour and a half in this strain, and then he wrote:
"For all their pleasant seeming, our desires
A dread scourge are that drives us to our doom;
Blindly we blunder thro' the maze where waits us
Death, the fell serpent, in the murky gloom.
Oh! let us strangle our insensate longings!
They do but lure us from the appointed way;
Lead us thro' thorns to our most bitter ruing,
Leave us heartbroken in the twilight grey.
And in the end full surely Death awaits us,
Lives there the man but knows that he must die?"
He wrote more in the same spirit—twenty-eight lines in all.
"That's good!" exclaimed the poet; and went home quite satisfied with himself.
At home he read the lines to his wife. She liked them. She merely said:
"There is something wrong with the first four lines."
"They will swallow it all right. Pushkin too began rather badly. But what do you think of the metre? It is that of a requiem."