The thing we like about that poem is its recognition of all the sorrow there is in the universe ... its unflinching recognition, we might say, if we were not afraid of praising our own work too highly ... combined with its happy ending.
One feels, upon reading it, that, although everything everywhere is very sad, and all wrong, one has only to have patience and after a while everything everywhere will be quite right and very sweet.
No matter how interested one may be in these literary problems, one must cease discussing them at times or one will be late to one's meals.
Don Marquis.
A LITTLE SWIRL OF VERS LIBRE
NOT COVERED, STRANGE TO SAY, BY THE PENAL CODE
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I am numb from world-pain—
I sway most violently as the thoughts course through me,
And athwart me,
And up and down me—
Thoughts of cosmic matters,
Of the mergings of worlds within worlds,
And unutterabilities
And room-rent,
And other tremendously alarming phenomena,
Which stab me,
Rip me most outrageously;
(Without a semblance, mind you, of respect for the Hague Convention's rules governing soul-slitting.)
Aye, as with the poniard of the Finite pricking the rainbow-bubble of the Infinite!
(Some figure, that!)
(Some little rush of syllables, that!)—
And make me—(are you still whirling at my coat-tails, reader?)
Make me—ahem, where was I?—oh, yes—make me,
In a sudden, overwhelming gust of soul-shattering rebellion,
Fall flat on my face!
Thomas R. Ybarra.
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YOUNG LOCHINVAR