Читать книгу Impertinent Poems - Cooke Edmund Vance - Страница 9

You look at yourself in the glass and say:

"Really, I'm rather distingué.

To be sure my eyes

Are assorted in size,

And my mouth is a crack

Running too far back,

And I hardly suppose

An unclassified nose

Is a mark of beauty, as beauty goes;

But still there's something about the whole

Suggesting a beauty of – well, say soul."

And this is the reason that photograph-galleries

Are able to pay employees' salaries.

Now, this little mark of our brotherhood,

By which each thinks that his looks are good,

Is laudable quite in you and me,

Provided we not only look, but be.

I look at my poem and you hear me say:

"Really, it's clever in its way.

The theme is old

And the style is cold.

These words run rude;

That line is crude;

And here is a rhyme

Which fails to chime,

And the metre dances out of time.

Oh, it isn't so bright it'll blind the sun,

But it's better than that by Such-a-one."

And this is the reason I and my creditors

Curse the "unreasoning whims" of editors,

And yet, if one writes for a livelihood,

He ought to believe that his work is good,

Provided the form that his vanity takes

Not only believes, but also makes.

And there is our neighbor. We've heard him say:

"Really, I'm not the commonest clay.

Brown got his dust

By betraying a trust;

And Jones's wife

Leads a terrible life;

While I have heard

That Robinson's word

Isn't quite so good as Gas preferred.

And Smith has a soul with seamy cracks,

For he talks of people behind their backs!"

And these are the reasons the penitentiary

Holds open house for another century.

True, we want no man in our neighborhood

Who doesn't consider his character good,

But then it ought to be also true

He not only knows to consider, but do.