From Phyllis McGinley’s A Pocketful of Wry.

Millennium

Some day,
Some blank, odd, pallid, immemorial day,
Some curious Monday,
Some Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
Or even Sunday,
I shall arise dishevelled and a gaper,
To scan the paper
And stare thereon, thumb through, search it for clues,
Peruse and re-peruse,
And find no news.

Nothing to heat the blood or race the pulse,
Nothing at all —
No six-inch headlines screaming a war’s results
Or a city’s fall.
No threats, no bombs, no air-raids, no alarms,
No feats of arms,
No foe at any gate,
No politics, no shouting candidate;
Nothing exclusive, not a censored phrase,
No Scoops, no Exposés;
No crisis either foreign or domestic,
Nothing wild, urgent, imminent or drastic
Happening on the earth.

Only reports of weather and the birth
Of triplets to a lioness at the Zoo,
(Printed within a box)
And yesterday’s sermons seeming scarcely new
And something about the White-or-Sundry-Sox;
An actress married or divorced or dead,
Who led
The golfing in some tournament or other.

Oh, I shall smother
In ennui, I shall nod and yawn
And fling the dull sheets down upon the lawn,
Bored near to death by what they have to say
On that strange, beautiful day.

From Phyllis McGinley’s On the Contrary.

Melancholy Reflections After a Lost Argument

I always pay the verbal score
 With wit, concise, selective.
I have an apt and ample store
 Of ladylike invective.

My mots, retorts, and quips of speech,
 Hilarious or solemn,
Placed end to end, no doubt, would reach
 To any gossip column.

But what avails the epigram,
 The clever and the clear shot,
Invented chiefly when I am
 The only one in earshot?

And where’s the good of repartee
 To quell a hostile laughter,
That tardily occurs to me
 A half an hour after?

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
 Who nastily have caught
The art of always striking when
 The irony is hot.

From Phyllis McGinley’s A Short Walk to the Station.

One Crowded Hour of Glorious Strife

I love my daughters with a love unfailing,
I love them healthy and I love them ailing.
I love them as sheep are loved by the shepherd,
With a fiery love like a lion or a leopard.
I love them gentle or inclined to mayhem —
But I love them warmest after eight-thirty A.M.

Oh, the peace like heaven
 That wraps me around,
Say, at eight-thirty-seven,
 When they’re schoolroom-bound,
With the last glove mated
 And the last scarf tied,
With the pigtail plaited,
 With the pincurl dried,
And the egg disparaged,
 And the porridge sneered at,
And last night’s comics furtively peered at,
The coat apprehended
 On its ultimate hook,
And the cover mended
 On the history book!

How affection swells, how my heart leaps up
As I sip my coffee from a lonely cup!
For placid as the purling of woodland waters
Is a house divested of its morning daughters.
Sweeter than the song of the lark in the sky
Are my darlings’ voices as they shriek good-by —

With the last shoe burnished
 And the last pen filled,
And the bus fare furnished
 And the radio stilled;
When I’ve signed the excuses
 And written the notes,
And poured fresh juices
 Down ritual throats,
And rummaged for umbrellas
 Lest the day grow damper,
And rescued homework from an upstairs hamper,
And stripped my wallet
 In the daily shakedown,
And tottered to my pallet
 For a nervous breakdown.

Oh, I love my daughters with a love that’s reckless
As Cornelia’s for the jewels in her fabled necklace.
But Cornelia, even, must have raised three cheers
At the front door closing on her school-bent dears.

From Phyllis McGinley’s A Short Walk to the Station.

Mourning’s at Eight-Thirty

(Or, a headline a day keeps euphoria away)

‘Tis day. I waken, full of cheer,
 And cast the nightmare’s shackle.
Hark, hark! the sanguine lark I hear
 Or possibly the grackle,

Phoebus arises. So do I;
 Then, tuneful from the shower,
Descend with head and courage high
 To greet the breakfast hour.

All’s well with all my world. I seem
 A mover and a shaper
Till from the doorstep with the cream
 I fetch the morning paper —

Till I fetch in the paper and my hopes begin to bleed.
There’s a famine on the Danube, there’s a crisis on the Tweed,
And the foes of peace are clever,
And my bonds no good whatever,
And I wish I had never
 Learned to read.

The coffee curdling in my cup
 Turns bitterer than tonic,
For stocks are down and steaks are up
 And planes are supersonic.

Crops fail. Trains crash. The outlook’s bright
 For none except the coffiner,
While empires topple left and right,
 Though Leftward rather oftener,

And Russia will not come to terms,
 And Sikhs are full of passion,
And each advertisement affirms
 My wardrobe’s out of fashion.

Oh, I see by the papers we are dying by degrees.
There’s a war upon our border, there’s a blight upon our trees;
And to match each Wonder Drug up
That our scientists have dug up,
They have also turned the bug up
 Of a painful new disease.

At eventide the journals face
 In happier directions.
They like a juicy murder case,
 They dote on comic sections.

But in the morning even “Books”
 Sends shudders coursing through me.
The outlook for the Drama looks
 Intolerably gloomy,

And though the sun with all his heart
 Is shining round my shoulder,
I notice by the weather chart
 Tomorrow will be colder.

Oh, I wake in the dawning and my dreams are rosy-red,
But the papers all assure me there’s destruction straight ahead,
If the present’s pretty dismal,
Why, the future’s quite abysmal,
And I think that I’ll just
  crawl
    back
      to
       bed.

From Phyllis McGinley’s Stones from a Glass House.

Admonition

(To the Chicago Daily Times, which is advocating a one-day smokers’ fast to relieve the cigarette shortage)

O Times, O reckless journal,
O sheet unblest!
What is this mischief, this design infernal
That you suggest?
Let smokers for one dreary day and night
Absent themselves, you say, from all delight.
Then we might see the secret stores unlocked,
The Luckies back, the shelves with Camels stocked.
Perhaps. I merely tender this advice:
Consider the Price.

Consider a nation
Biting its nails and wrestling with temptation
For twenty-four desperate hours.
Think of the tempers poised on murder’s brink,
Of men at morning fainting in their showers,
Or driven, at eve, to drink.

Think, think
Of the vast quarrels let loose, the evil forces,
The words across the tables, the divorces,
Tots scurrying from the path
Of strange parental wrath,
Bosses, for once unwary,
Firing the blond and guiltless secretary,
Collaborations coming to an end,
Friend bickering with friend,
The innocent delivered to the furies
Of untobaccoed juries,
Deals lost, wives beaten, relatives told off,
And all for lack of a carload and a cough.

Through the small haze which wreathes about me yet
(From what now passes for a cigarette),
I conjure up the horrors of that day,
And, gentlemen, I say,
Resign your scheme. Quick, take your project back.
Better the lack,
The scramble, the shortage, the barley-flavored brand
Than anarchy across this smiling land.
Better, I cry, a bottleneck met head on
Than Armageddon.

From The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley.

Lines Scribbled on a Program

Whenever public speakers rise
 To dazzle hearers and beholders,
A film comes over both my eyes.
 Inevitably, toward my shoulders
I feel my head begin to sink.
It is an allergy, I think.

No matter what the time or place,
 No matter how adroit the speaker
Or rich the tone or famed the face,
 I feel my life force ebbing weaker.
Even the chairman, lauding him,
Can make the room about me swim.

The room swims. And my palms are wet.
 Languor and lassitude undo me.
I fumble with a cigarette
 For ashtrays never handy to me,
Lift chin, grit teeth, shift in my chair,
But nothing helps — not even prayer.

From all who Talk, I dream away —
 From statesmen heavy with their travels,
From presidents of P.T.A.
 Exchanging honorary gavels;
From prelate, pedant, wit, and clown,
Club treasurer, John Mason Brown;

From lecturers on the ductless gland,
 Ex-Communists, ex-dukes, exhorters,
Poets with poems done by hand,
 Political ladies, lady reporters,
Professors armed with bell and book,
Mimes, magnates, mayors, Alistair Cooke.

The hot, the fluent, and the wise,
 The dull, the quick-upon-the-trigger —
Alike, alike they close my eyes.
 Alike they rob me of my vigor.
For me Demosthenes, with pain,
Had mouthed his Attic stones in vain.

The aforementioned being clear
 Concerning speech, concerning speaker,
Alas, what am I doing here,
 Facing my empty plate and beaker,
And watching with a wild unrest
The rising of the evening’s Guest?
Ah, was it mine, this monstrous choice?
Whose accents these? And whose the voice
That wakes in me a pang well known?

Good God, it is my own, my own!

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1937, One More Manhattan.

Lend Me Five Till Saturday?

Of all the words of tongue or pen,
Intoned by mice, proclaimed by men,
 Engraved on stone or snow —
All mottoes framed in prose or rhyme
To echo down the vaults of time —
 Most excellent is “No.”
Oh, brave and lovely syllable,
Heart-lifting and mouth-fillable!

Compact of artistry and wit,
Two letters form the whole of it,
 An N, a rolling zero;
A brace of simple characters
Whose utterance alone confers
 The accent of the hero.
Come, lift in swelling chorus,
The negative sonorous.

Down with the meek and yielding “yea.”
Teach the imperious tongue to say
“No” to your friends and “No” to strangers,
To eager meddlers and arrangers,
To bellboys, beggars, wishful waiters,
To vacuum-cleaning demonstrators;
To grimy boys inquiring “Shine?”;
To invitations out to dine
Where all the guests are put to shame
Unless they love the Parlor Game;
To hairdressers who drop you hints
About a vegetable rinse;
To friends of friends of friends from Reno
Who yearn to see the French Casino;
To hostesses who’d show you views
They took upon their Southern Cruise;
Chain letters; histrionic pleas
For sweet but dubious charities;
Insurance agents under full sail,
And people who can get it “whulsale.”

Say “No” to them (and do not budge)
Who’d make you Honorary Judge.
 Cry “No” from dusk till dawn —
Of all glad words pronounced or printed,
The noblest phrase that ever glinted
 In youth’s bright lexicon.
And when your tongue can turn it,
I wish you’d help me learn it.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1934, On the Contrary.

Song From Town

If I were in the mountains, now,
 That bred and nourished me,
The wind would tease the aspen bough
 To cool hilarity.

In colored canyons, I could learn
 Steadfastness from a pine,
And fill my hands with leaves and fern
 And roving columbine.

I’d have no need to shut the sun
 From windows facing south.
Down every slope would coolness run
 To kiss me on the mouth.

O, hills desired! But this is how
 Perverse I am, and queer.
If I were in the mountains, now,
 I’d wish that I were here.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1969, Saint-Watching.

“History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art, as the Greeks knew; so that when they were parceling out the deities, they gave history a Muse of her own just as they assigned one each to poetry and playwriting and music and other explosions of the imagination. I was reminded of this truth only yesterday morning. I had picked up for an hour’s refreshment that exquisite but perverse essay of Virginia Woolf’s, ‘A Room of One’s Own.’ One bleak sentence caught my skeptical eye. ‘Nothing,’ it said flatly, ‘is known about women before the eighteenth century.’ Now Mrs. Woolf the novelist is a delight. Mrs. Woolf the historian is something else again. If I put my trust in her I must believe that until recently women had been a voiceless, hopeless multitude, without power or influence in the world. I must take for granted the odd idea that we moderns who write and paint and manage corporations and elect Presidents sprang full-panoplied from the forehead of the Nineteenth Amendment. I am perfectly willing to grant my sex an astonishing adaptability, but I cannot give such a theory as Mrs. Woolf’s a full assent. Naturally I’m grateful for the ballot and my Rights just as I’m grateful for automatic dish-washers, air-conditioning, penicillin, and other latter-day luxuries. But I doubt that, even unenfranchised, our ancestresses were so underprivileged a group as feminist history makes them out. They did not lash themselves to railings in their drive toward equality with men, or go on hunger strikes. But in that they admitted no impediment to their abilities, they were, in a way, the first feminists. And anyone who contends that there were no great women before the eighteenth century has not read history with any care.”

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1959, The Province of the Heart (Essays). From “A Garland of Kindness”:

“I grow more accustomed, as the years pass, to accepting kindness. But I have never ceased to cherish with affection and with pride an incident that happened soon after we had moved here. I think it was then I began to collect the flowers for my garland, as children collect chestnuts in the fall, valuing them for their number rather than their use. The war — one of the wars — was in progress then, and the affair revolved about a Japanese family living not far from us. I shall call them the Yamotos. They were pleasant people who spoke English well and were interested in politics only to the extent that they had left Japan because they preferred democratic ways. Mr. Yamoto commuted with the other husbands, and Mrs. Yamoto attended sessions of the P.T.A. and compared notes with the other wives on report cards and pressure cookers. Then an ugly thing occurred. The Yamotos cultivated, like all of us, a vegetable garden where the back lawn used to spread, and one sweet spring night it was broken into and uprooted. Who the vandals were it was never discovered. I think we all prayed that it was children’s work. Surely we did not harbor here an adult mind so twisted and vindictive as to consider the outrage a patriotic act! The news shocked me into nausea. Hate, the kind of hate that darkened Europe, seemed to be casting its shadow on our own people. But, true to my city training, shock merely numbed me. I thought of atonement in terms of letters to the papers; my neighbors protested less and did more. By evening the garden had been replanted. There were no public statements, no petitions, no paid protests. Simply, people with gardens of their own came hurrying spontaneously to the rescue with plants, with seedlings, with spades for digging and stakes to drive into the ground. By an act of common love we wiped out our uncommon shame.”