Like toothless children gnawing their corals,
Gnawing their corals to soothe their gums
With a kind of watery thought that comes.
W. C. Smith (Borland Hall).
Why do we respect some vegetables, and despise others? The bean is a graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can put beans in poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. Corn—which, in my garden, grows alongside the bean, and, so far as I can see, with no affectation of superiority—is, however, the child of song. It “waves” in all literature.
Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).
Mr. Yeats has, however, rescued the bean from its invidious position (The Lake Isle of Innisfree):—
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;