on hearing french children speak french

Children — a well-known circumstance —
Speak French extremely well in France;
Their accent, to the wondering ear,
Is perfect, and their diction clear.

But when I watch them at their play,
They might be kids in Deal, N. J.
Like girls and boys one sees about
At home, they tumble, run, and shout;
Like others of their age and ilk,
They dote on sweets, they thrive on milk;
They are, their mothers sadly sigh,
Petits bébés, as here they’re styled,
Cry very like my neighbor’s child.

I, noting thus what’s said and done,
Judge the world is, or should be, one;
It is the planet’s blackest blot
That it should be — and that it’s not.

(From The New Yorker, October 29, 1949)

note on geriatrics

Few people know how to be old — La Rochefoucauld

Very few, so we are told,
Are skilled at all in being old,
And of those few, few will admit
To age, whatso they make of it,
And when they do admit it, sadly,
They act their years but do it badly.
Midnight, when they should be abed,
They’re mostly on the town instead;
Their passions, which should now be
Quiet,
Break out anew in ill-timed riot;
The elders they should drowse among
They snub, to gambol with the young.
An old man is not, as a rule,
Too old to be much less a fool.

But as one looks about, one fears
Few manage well their middle years,
Or are, in their pretended prime,
Clever with love or wealth or time.
How awkward, too, and how uncouth,
The young are in their use of youth,
And babes, as anyone can see,
Make shambles of their infancy.

The old mess up their day, but, oh,
They’re not alone, La Rochefoucauld!

(From The New Yorker, February 21, 1953)

From Richard Armour’s Golf Bawls.

did kilmer play golf?

I think that I shall never see
My ball beneath a spreading tree,
Whose roots give me a dreadful lie,
Whose branches strike me in the eye,
Whose leaves obliterate the view,
Whose trunk prevents a follow through —
I’ll never see a tree, I swear,
And not wish it were otherwhere.

pro and con

I took a lesson from the pro,
Who told me all I ought to know
About my grip, my shift of weight,
Just how to keep my left arm straight
And cock my wrists, and uncock too,
With head down on the follow through,
Besides some pointers on my pivot,
And how to take the proper divot.

However, now I have, I find,
So many things upon my mind
That if, perchance, I think of all,
I then forget to hit the ball.

lines on luck

A golfer’s luck is always tough,
 His good luck’s simply nil;
The bad bounce goes into the rough,
 The good bounce — hell, that’s skill!

bad moment

Heard is the distant, frenzied shout
Of “Fore!” as the ball goes sailing out,
Straight at the head, or other part,
Of some poor innocent, pure of heart,
Who, bent over double, head in hands,
Awaits the moment the stray ball lands,
Hoping the while, though hope is dim,
That the law of averages favors him.

two ways out

Some golfers blast their ball from traps
 With one adroit explosion,
But others, out in ten perhaps,
 Depend upon erosion.

not to mention yourself

The tee that’s not level,
 The ball that is dead,
The fellow who’s talking,
 The slowpokes ahead,

The fairway that’s soggy,
 The green that’s unmown,
The trap’s wrong location,
 The ground rule unknown,

The shaft that is crooked,
 The clubhead that’s loose —
It takes little looking
 To find an excuse.

one down

Weight distributed,
 Free from strain,
Divot replaced,
 Familiar terrain,
Straight left arm,
 Unmoving head —
Here lies the golfer,
 Cold and dead.

(From Academic Graffiti, 1972.)

St. Thomas Aquinas
Always regarded wine as
A medicinal juice
That helped him to deduce.

Martin Buber
Never said “Thou” to a tuber:
Despite his creed,
He did not feel the need.

Desiderius Erasmus
Always avoided chiasmus,
But grew addicted as time wore on
To oxymoron.

No one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Phenomenology.

Henry James
Abhorred the word Dames,
And always wrote “Mommas“
With inverted commas.

When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must,
But only just.

Karl Kraus
Always had some grouse
Among his bête noires
Were Viennese choirs.

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase “financial sharks,”
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

Nietzsche
Had the habit as a teacher
Of cracking his joints
To emphasise his points.

Whenever Xantippe
Wasn’t feeling too chippy,
She would bawl at Socrates:
“Why aren’t you Hippocrates?”

(From A Jacques Barzun Reader, 2002, Edited by Michael Murray.)

Margaret of Navarre,
Strummed on the guitar
While her bawdy friend Rabelais
Warbled cantabile.

William Butler Yeats,
In one of his states,
Swore: “The French say I’m no gentilhomme:
I’m sailing to Byzantium!”

El Greco
Took a long dekko
And put his sitter in place;
Then he said: “Now pull a long face.”

The young Napoleon
Hadn’t a simoleon
When he married Josephine.
Soon he hadn’t a bean.

Robert Frost
Turned and tossed.
His nightmare was, What to do
If the road branched into more than two?

Arthur Conan Doyle
Burned the midnight oil
To create a sinister party
Named Moriarty.

Jonathan Swift
Was visibly miffed:
His horse had implied it was new in him
To be kind to a Houyhnhnm.

René Descartes
Murmured: “For my part,
If I cogitate, it must be clear
That I am here.”

G. W. F. Hegel
Invented the bagel.
He liked its peculiar density.
(His prose has the same propensity.)

Henry James
Named no names,
But The Bostonians knew
Who was Who.

Feodor Dostoyevsky
While skating on the Nevsky
Cried: “Think of me as of
Another brother Karamazov.”

Wise old Lao-Tse
Knew he knew The Way.
Had it been wiser to walk with the Buddha,
He woudda.

New at IWP Books: Samuel Hoffenstein, 1928, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

From Songs About Life and Brighter Things Yet

xxii

I do respect that noble man
Who, when he’s full of trouble can
Preserve a bright and cheerful mien
As if his life were all serene;
But I prefer the fellow, who
Is lively as a kangaroo
And beams and shouts with pure delight
When everything is going right.

xxvii

The camel has a hump, but he
Looks just as curiously at me.

xxxi

The dinosaur and icthyosaur
Are not among the things that are,
Though once the beasts were features;
Ah, sad it is to contemplate
How Nature can eliminate
Unnecessary creatures!
Perhaps she will, at last, extend
The process to another end —
To man, and even woman,
And turn the final hose of Fate
And give the biologic gate
To the obnoxious human!

New at IWP Books: Ethel Jacobson, 1952, Larks in My Hair. From the Preface by Richard Armour: “Light verse is so sharp and swift and streamlined that it has a modern look. Yet it is an ancient and honorable kind of poetry. It has been written by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Herrick and Pope and Byron, in fact by every poet who has had moments of playfulness and has not taken himself too seriously. At its best, light verse is a widely appealing and highly civilized form of writing. And here, certainly, is light verse at its best.”

The Unbent Twig

When Susie came to bless our home,
My full heart fashioned a joyful pome
Till Reason rasped, with an ugly leer,
“O.K., but where do we go from here?”

For I’d been taught, as a young girl is,
The principal exports of far Cadiz,
And French subjunctives and Saxon rimes
And all about Homer his life and times,
And Avogadro and Alcibiades,
But nothing of infantile diets and diades;
So, full of impatience and mother love,
I set out to master these last above.

There were books in rows, there were books in stacks,
On library shelves and reference racks,
And I read each expert and conned each system
And carefully set out to check and list ’em
From Dr. Watson to Dr. Holt
And the Mustn’t-Spank-ers, in one stiff jolt;
From cod-liver oil to Constructive Play,
From Z-is-for-Zebra to Vitamin A.

Yet, hard though I struggled to weigh and weed ’em,
New books came faster than I could read ’em,
Each blandly discrediting all the lore
I’d painfully managed to grasp before.
Oh, I studied madly till wan and woozy,
But I couldn’t decide how to bring up Susie.
 But while I grew groggy
 At Wisdom’s cup,
 What do you think?
 Susie grew up.

The Spitball Crowd

Surveys reveal large percentages of pupils in modern
grade and high schools who are ignorant of history,
sentence structure, simple addition, the months of the
year, and how to tell time. — News item.

Modern education
Has been dandy, has been ducky.
The current generation
Is deliriously lucky.
Its members have been spared the blight
Of bothering to read and write.

McGuffey’s Third
Got the bird,
And — long division?
How absurd.
They don’t study, they don’t mind,
But no one’s ever left behind.
They learn no lessons, thumb no books,
And they give Teacher dirty looks.

How virgin their mentalities,
Their wants uncurbed and candid,
And, my! their personalities
Are only too expanded.
Their social attitudes are dillies,
But syntax gives them the howling willies.

For Teacher was the damp-eared kind
Whose pedagogic frills
Left rude discipline behind
And all the prosy skills
The times demand of lass and lad
Who now must haply learn to add,
And ponder over 3 x 3,
Penmanship, and C-A-T.

From Richard Armour’s Writing Light Verse: “There is no end to the humorous and satirical verses that can be written by men about women, by women about men, or by the writer about his or her own sex, always pointing up the special foibles that make a comparison of the sexes so fascinating to writer and reader alike. The male light verse writers, such as Samuel Hoffenstein and Arthur Guiterman, have done very well. But the women, notably Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, Margaret Fishback, and Ethel Jacobson, have done even better. They seem to have a sharper eye — as well as a sharper pen.”

New at IWP Books: Margaret Fishback, 1937, One to a Customer

River, Stay ‘way from My Door

The world is crammed with superior souls,
 Embodying every virtue.
All of them aim at lofty goals,
 And nary a one would hurt you.
All of their ilk are good and kind,
 Magnanimous, noble people,
Who turn the thoughts of the mundane mind
 To the peak of a high church steeple.
Thousands of these exist who are
Honest and bright, and better by far
Than you and I. But the fact remains
That often they give us shooting pains.

Many’s the person I do not
 Hanker to see, although I
Am quick to acknowledge they have got
 Characters pure and snowy.
Many’s the mortal I admire
 But do not prefer to be with.
Many’s the man whom I aspire
 Not to live in a tree with.
I like so many, and yet it’s true
The ones that I want for pals are few —
A half a dozen or so, not more,
To slide with me down my cellar door.

The rest — well, I wish them luck and health
 And flagons of fine old brandy.
I wish them joy and I wish them wealth
 And the best assorted candy.
But what I wish the most to achieve,
 And what I persist in hoping,
Is that at length the herd may leave
 Me to my misanthroping.
For I am a hermit mean as mud.
My heart was nipped in the well-known bud.
And I want the people I want. And never
The rest, no matter how fine and clever.

From An Armoury of Light Verse (1964) by Richard Armour.

See Here

His friends can’t see what he sees in her,
 Nor hers, what she sees in him.
No, love isn’t blind — it’s those not in love
 Whose sights is so frightfully dim.

Election Results

An office-seeker, if defeated,
Finds his stock of friends depleted.

An office-seeker, if elected,
Has friends he’d not before suspected.

Birds of a Feather

Though disagreement and debate
And argument may stimulate

The self-contented, sluggish mind,
I must admit I am inclined,

Whenever possible, to be with
Those kindred souls whom I agree with.

Think of It

A new digital computer has been built that will think like a
man, even making human errors — News Item

Comes now a digital computer
Astute as man, but not astuter,
That thinks a complex problem through
Precisely as we humans do.

They’ve built such think machines before,
To do, and quick, some highbrow chore,
But never one whose thinking bordered
Upon the fuzzy and disordered,

One that grows tired, a second-rater
That puts things off till sometime later,
That tends to daydream, idly blinking,
And think up ways to keep from thinking.

We should, I guess, give praise to science
For making such a fine appliance,
Though I’m inclined to feel, somehow,
We’re overstocked on these things now.

New at IWP Books: Richard Armour, 1958, Nights with Armour. From the Preface: “The poems in this volume, the reader will doubtless note with satisfaction, are short. Most of them run to no more than eight or ten lines, and some of them barely walk. Because of their brevity, they can be recommended to persons who go to sleep as soon as their head hits the pillow. Even in that short interval it is possible to read a couplet or two, and if the reader fails to get through such a piece he will have missed comparatively little. On the other hand, persons who are afflicted with insomnia will also find the brevity of the poems useful, since they can vary things a little by counting poems instead of sheep. This is something that cannot be done with a volume containing only ‘Paradise Lost’ or ‘The Ring and the Book.'”

Adolescent

A mind? Yes, he
 Has one of those.
It comes, however,
 And it goes.

And if, when it
 Is called upon,
It mostly happens
 To be gone,

Don’t fret, don’t shout,
 Don’t curse the lack.
Just wait a while —
 It will be back.

Taking It Easy

When the day of complete
Automation comes,
We’ll put up our feet
And twiddle our thumbs.

But, far from serene,
We’ll say it’s just middling,
And want a machine
To take over the twiddling.

Debate

Convinced by Con,
Persuaded by Pro,
The pendulum mind
Swings to and fro,

Till cleared is the hall
And closed is the door,
When it comes to rest
Where it was before.