MIDSUMMER MADNESS

A SOLILOQUY

I am a hearthrug—
Yes, a rug—
Though I cannot describe myself as snug;
Yet I know that for me they paid a price
For a Turkey carpet that would suffice
(But we live in an age of rascal vice).
Why was I ever woven,
For a clumsy lout, with a wooden leg,
To come with his endless Peg! Peg!
Peg! Peg!
With a wooden leg,
Till countless holes I'm drove in.
("Drove," I have said, and it should be "driven";
A hearthrug's blunders should be forgiven,
For wretched scribblers have exercised
Such endless bosh and clamour,
So improvidently have improvised,
That they've utterly ungrammaticised
Our ungrammatical grammar).
And the coals
Burn holes,
Or make spots like moles,
And my lily-white tints, as black as your hat turn,
And the housemaid (a matricide, will-forging slattern),
Rolls
The rolls
From the plate, in shoals,
When they're put to warm in front of the coals;
And no one with me condoles,
For the butter stains on my beautiful pattern.
But the coals and rolls, and sometimes soles,
Dropp'd from the frying-pan out of the fire.
Are nothing to raise my indignant ire,
Like the Peg! Peg!
Of that horrible man with the wooden leg.
This moral spread from me,
Sing it, ring it, yelp it—
Never a hearthrug be,
That is if you can help it.
Unknown.

MAVRONE

ONE OF THOSE SAD IRISH POEMS, WITH NOTES

From Arranmore the weary miles I've come;
An' all the way I've heard
A Shrawn[1] that's kep' me silent, speechless, dumb,
Not sayin' any word.
An' was it then the Shrawn of Eire,[2] you'll say,
For him that died the death on Carrisbool?
It was not that; nor was it, by the way,
The Sons of Garnim[3] blitherin' their drool;
Nor was it any Crowdie of the Shee,[4]
Or Itt, or Himm, nor wail of Barryhoo[5]
For Barrywhich that stilled the tongue of me.
'Twas but my own heart cryin' out for you
Magraw![6] Bulleen, shinnanigan, Boru,
Aroon, Machree, Aboo![7]
Arthur Guiterman.

[1] A Shrawn is a pure Gaelic noise, something like a groan, more like a shriek, and most like a sigh of longing.

[2] Eire was daughter of Carne, King of Connaught. Her lover, Murdh of the Open Hand, was captured by Greatcoat Mackintosh, King of Ulster, on the plain of Carrisbool, and made into soup. Eire's grief on this sad occasion has become proverbial.

[3] Garnim was second cousin to Manannan MacLir. His sons were always sad about something. There were twenty-two of them, and they were all unfortunate in love at the same time, just like a chorus at the opera. "Blitherin' their drool" is about the same as "dreeing their weird."