Tobogganing on Parnassus

Excerpt

Us Poets

Wordsworth wrote some tawdry stuff;
  Much of Moore I have forgotten;
Parts of Tennyson are guff;
  Bits of Byron, too, are rotten.

All of Browning isn't great;
  There are slipshod lines in Shelley;
Every one knows Homer's fate;
  Some of Keats is vermicelli.

Sometimes Shakespeare hit the slide,
  Not to mention Pope or Milton;
Some of Southey's stuff is snide.
  Some of Spenser's simply Stilton.

When one has to boil the pot,
  One can't always watch the kittle.
You may credit it or not—
  Now and then I slump a little!

Rubber-Stamp Humour

If couples mated but for love;
  If women all were perfect cooks;
  If Hoosier authors wrote no books;
        If horses always won;
If people in the flat above
  Were silent as the very grave;
  If foreign counts were prone to save;
        If tailors did not dun—

If automobiles always ran
  As advertised in catalogues;
  If tramps were not afraid of dogs;
        If servants never left;
If comic songs would always scan;
  If Alfred Austin were sublime;
  If poetry would always rhyme;
        If authors all were deft—

If office boys were not all cranks
  On base-ball; if the selling price
  Of meat and coal and eggs and ice
        Would stop its mad increase;
If women started saying "Thanks"
  When men gave up their seats in cars;
  If there were none but good cigars,
        And better yet police—

If there were no such thing as booze;
  If wifey's mother never came
  To visit; if a foot-ball game
        Were mild and harmless sport;
If all the Presidential news
  Were colourless; if there were men
  At every mountain, sea-side, glen,
        River and lake resort—

If every girl were fair of face;
  If women did not fear to get
  Their suits for so-called bathing wet—
        If all these things were true,
This earth would be a pleasant place.
  But where would people get their laughs?
  And whence would spring the paragraphs?
        And what would jokers do?

The Simple Stuff

AD PUERUM

Horace: Book I, Ode 32.

"Persicos odi, puer, apparatus."

Nix on the Persian pretence!
  Myrtle for Quintus H. Flaccus!
Wreaths of the linden tree, hence!
Nix on the Persian pretence!
Waiter, here's seventy cents—
  Come, let me celebrate Bacchus!
Nix on the Persian pretence!
  Myrtle for Quintus H. Flaccus.

"Carpe Diem," or Cop the Day

AD LEUCONOEN

Horace: Book I, Ode 13.

"Tu ne quoesieris, scire nefas—"

It is not right for you to know, so do not ask,
  Leuconoe,
How long a life the gods may give or ever we
  are gone away;
Try not to read the Final Page, the ending
  colophonian,
Trust not the gypsy's tea-leaves, nor the
  prophets Babylonian.
Better to have what is to come enshrouded
  in obscurity
Than to be certain of the sort and length of
  our futurity.
Why, even as I monologue on wisdom and
  longevity
How Time has flown! Spear some of it...!