New at IWP Books: Richard Armour, 1954, Light Armour.

Lines for the Day After Elections

The sun still rises in the east,
The song of skylarks has not ceased,
The mountains stand, the seas are calm,
I hear no detonating bomb.

The banks are open, trains on time,
The morning paper’s rich with crime,
A stream of traffic fills the street,
The ground is firm beneath my feet.

No cataclysmic conflagration
As yet has swept our luckless nation.
No sign of doom have I detected,
Although my man was not elected.

So Many People Put Themselves into My Shoes That I Think I’ll Go Barefoot

My friend says not to worry,
 My friend pooh-poohs my fears,
His words are quite consoling,
 His optimism cheers.

This view unvexed, undaunted,
 How comforting it is…
He looks upon my worries
 The way I do at his.

New at IWP Books: Richard Armour, 1946, Leading With My Left (Introduction by Max Eastman).

State of Mind

Gray grow my hairs
 And bald grows my pate
From the state of affairs
 Of affairs of state.

Two Bad

Black marketeers are called up short
 And hotly deprecated
And when they’re caught, haled into court,
 Fined, or incarcerated.

All well and good. I’m nothing loath,
 Just so, with prices higher,
We don’t forget the fault’s due both
 To seller and to buyer.

Linguist

Byrnes Learns to Say “I Agree” and “No” in Russian. — Newspaper Headline

It would appear the Secretary
Has not a large vocabulary.
The range is great, that’s plainly seen,
But still, there’s not much in between.

He lacks the words for “maybe” and
“Perhaps,” and “on the other hand.”
He cannot say, in accents pure,
“That may well be, I’m not quite sure.”

With only “I agree” and “no”
With which to handle Uncle Joe,
With heads he wins and tails he loses,
A lot depends on which he chooses.

New at IWP Books: Richard Armour, 1963, The Medical Muse.

Nurse, Hand Me My Oil Can

Will automation do away
With doctors, also, some fine day?
Will patients then, when they are ill,
Just press a button for a pill?

Will metal monsters cut the skin
With scalpels, probe around within,
And having done what’s needed, then
Stitch up the patient once again?

If things should come to such a pass,
With doctors mostly steel or brass,
There should be little cause for rue,
For patients will be robots too.

New at IWP Books: Richard Armour, 1947, Writing Light Verse.

“There are books on how to do just about anything. You can find one on how to build a birdhouse, twirl a baton, win an argument, operate an abacus, remember names and faces, grow tuberous begonias, or play a shepherd’s pipe. There are books on how to live, how to love, and how to die.

“But, while there are plenty of books designed to make easy the writing of a novel, a play, a short story, or a serious poem, there is nothing precisely of the sort to help the writer of light verse. Perhaps, as will be pointed out later, this is because the writing of light verse is considered so easy that no help is necessary. Certainly it is not because few persons are interested in writing it. It is said that The Saturday Evening Posti> alone receives several thousand pieces of light verse each week — and prints about six. When it sells, light verse generally brings a higher rate of pay than serious poetry, for the obvious reason that it is more appealing to the mass of readers and is therefore used in magazines of the largest circulation. It is a popular type of filler, inserted here and there to supply a few lines of type when stories and articles fall a bit short of the bottom of the page. The demand for light verse is steadily increasing, and so also is the number of persons willing, if not ready, to meet the demand.

“Many have been misled by the apparent ease of writing light verse and have entered the lists with high hopes, only to withdraw, chagrined and perplexed, after the eighth or tenth rejection slip. Others have scored a few times, but have been unable to keep it up; or have achieved their success only in some local, small-paying publication. This book is intended to encourage all of these persons to intensify their efforts, and to give them guidance in writing about the right subjects in the right way and sending their product to the right markets. It is, frankly, another of the host of “How to –” books. As such, it is meant to be simple and practical, a stimulus to do and a help in the doing. If something faintly resembling literary criticism is occasionally involved, it is only because it behooves the writer of light verse to know the difference between bad and good, and between fair and first-rate. Nor can the psychology of editors and readers be wholly neglected.

“This is also a personal book…”

New at IWP Books: Richard Armour, 1950, For Partly Proud Parents (Introduction by Phyllis McGinley).

Raising the Question

When I grow vexed and weary
 From Junior’s ceaseless “Why?”
His morn-to-evening query
 About the earth and sky,

My nerves are nearly shattered,
 My patience flickers low,
But how my ego’s flattered
 To think he’d think I know!

Deflation

Sons and daughters
In their teens
Think their parents
Don’t know beans.

Which would not be
Hard to face
Were it not so
Oft the case.

One More

One more story,
One more game,
Then we’ll scamper —
So they claim.

One more giant,
One more jump,
Of to bed
They say they’ll hump….

One’s so few
It’s hardly any —
Strange one more
Can be so many!

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

About Children

By all the published facts in the case,
Children belong to the human race.

Equipped with consciousness, passions, pulse,
They even grow up and become adults.

So why’s the resemblance, moral or mental,
Of children to people so coincidental?

Upright out of primordial dens,
Homo walked and was sapiens.

But rare as leviathans or auks
Is — male or female — the child who walks.

He runs, he gallops, he crawls, he pounces,
Flies, leaps, stands on his head, or bounces,

Imitates snakes or the tiger stripèd
But seldom recalls he is labeled “Biped.”

Which man or woman have you set sights on
Who craves to slumber with all the lights on

Yet creeps away to a lampless nook
In order to pore on a comic book?

Why, if (according to A. Gesell)
The minds of children ring clear as a bell,

Does every question one asks a tot
Receive the similar answer — “What?”

And who ever started the baseless rumor
That any child has a sense of humor?

Children conceive of no jest that’s madder
Than Daddy falling from a ten-foot ladder.

Their fancies sway like jetsam and flotsam;
One minute they’re winsome, the next they’re swatsome.

While sweet their visages, soft their arts are,
Cold as a mermaiden’s kiss their hearts are;

They comprehend neither pity nor treason.
An hour to them is a three months’ season.

So who can say — this is just between us —
That children and we are a common genus,

When the selfsame nimbus is eerily worn
By a nymph, a child, and a unicorn?

The Hundred Best Books by Mostyn T. Pigott (1865–1927)

First there’s the Bible,
 And then the Koran,
Odgers on Libel,
 Pope’s Essay on Man,
Confessions of Rousseau,
 The Essays of Lamb,
Robinson Crusoe
 And Omar Khayyam,
Volumes of Shelley
 And venerable Bede,
Machiavelli
 And Captain Mayne Reid,
Fox upon Martyrs
 And Liddell and Scott,
Stubbs on the Charters,
 The works of La Motte,
The Seasons by Thompson,
 And Paul de Verlaine,
Theodore Mommsen
 And Clemens (Mark Twain),
The Rocks of Hugh Miller,
 The Mill on the Floss,
The Poems of Schiller,
 The Iliados,
Don Quixote (Cervantes),
 La Pucelle by Voltaire,
Inferno (that’s Dante’s),
 And Vanity Fair,
Conybeare-Howson,
 Brillat-Savarin,
And Baron Munchausen,
 Mademoiselle De Maupin,
The Dramas of Marlowe,
 The Three Musketeers,
Clarissa Harlowe,
 And the Pioneers,
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,
 The Ring and the Book,
And Handy Andy,
 and Captain Cook,
The Plato of Jowett,
 And Mill’s Pol. Econ.,
The Haunts of Howitt,
 The Encheiridion,
Lothair by Disraeli,
 And Boccaccio,
The Student’s Paley,
 And Westward Ho!
The Pharmacopœia,
 Macaulay’s Lays,
Of course The Medea,
 And Sheridan’s Plays,
The Odes of Horace,
 And Verdant Green,
The Poems of Morris,
 The Faery Queen,
The Stones of Venice,
 Natural History (White’s),
And then Pendennis,
 The Arabian Nights,
Cicero’s Orations,
 Plain Tales from the Hills,
The Wealth of Nations,
 And Byles on Bills,
As in a Glass Darkly,
 Demosthenes’ Crown,
The Treatise of Berkeley,
 Tom Hughes’s Tom Brown,
The Mahabharata,
 The Humor of Hook,
The Kreutzer Sonata,
 And Lalla Rookh,
Great Battles by Creasy,
 And Hudibras,
And Midshipman Easy,
 And Rasselas,
Shakespear in extenso
 And the Æneid,
And Euclid (Colenso),
 The Woman Who Did,
Poe’s Tales of Mystery,
 Then Rabelais,
Guizot’s French History,
 And Men of the Day,
Rienzi, by Lytton,
 The Poems of Burns,
The Story of Britain,
 The Journey (that’s Sterne’s),
The House of Seven Gables,
 Carroll’s Looking-glass,
Æsop his Fables,
 And Leaves of Grass,
Departmental Ditties,
 The Woman in White,
The Tale of Two Cities,
 Ships that Pass in the Night,
Meredith’s Feverel,
 Gibbon’s Decline,
Walter Scott’s Peveril,
 And — some verses of mine.

From The Nonpareil Reader and Speaker for Young People, Edited by Matilda Blair, 1905.

From Phyllis McGinley’s One More Manhattan.

Portrait

Her thought is separate from her act
 And neither her defender is,
Whose nature seems at once compact
 Of courage and of cowardice.

Beset by hurricane and flood,
 She seeks no amnesty from Death,
Yet lacks intrinsic hardihood
 To weather a disdainful breath.

Watching the year grow late, grow late,
 She finds no desperation in it,
But cannot bear love’s little wait
 Between a minute and a minute.

Let the earth shake. She stands her ground.
 Let her house fall. She will not flee,
Who yet is shattered by the sound
 Of one door, closing, distantly.

From Phyllis McGinley’s Stones from a Glass House.

Landscape Without Figures

The shape of the summer has not changed at all.
 There is no difference in the sky’s rich color,
In texture of cloud or leaf or languid hill.
 The fringed wave is no duller.

Even the look of this village does not change —
 Shady and full of gardens and near the sea.
But something is lacking. Something sad and strange
 Troubles the memory.

Where are they? — the boys, not children and not men,
 In polo shirts or jeans or autographed blazers,
With voices suddenly deep, and proud on each chin
 The mark of new razors.

They were workers or players, but always the town was theirs.
 They wiped your windshield, they manned the parking lots.
They delivered your groceries. They drove incredible cars
 As if they were chariots.

They were lifeguards, self-conscious, with little whistles.
 They owned the tennis courts and the Saturday dances.
They were barbarous-dark with sun. They were vain of their muscles
 And the girls’ glances.

They boasted, and swam, and lounged at the drugstore’s portal.
 They sailed their boats and carried new records down.
They never took thought but that they were immortal,
 And neither did the town.

But now they are gone like leaves, like leaves in the fall,
Though the shape of the summer has not changed at all.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1960, Times Three.

Dirge for an Era

O! do you remember Paper Books
 When paper books were thinner?
It was all so gay
In that far-off day
When you fetched them home
At a quarter a tome
 To dip in after dinner
Or carry to bed in a handy packet,
Bosomy girls on every jacket.
And never a taint of Culture
 Sullied that wholesome air
But only bodies
In Bishop’s studies
 And blood on the bill-of-fare.
As the type grew blurry the plots grew thick.
But what do we get now?
Moby Dick.

Cluttering bookstore counters,
 In stationer’s windows preening,
The Paperbacks
Now offer us facts
On Tillich and Sartre
And abstract artre
 And Life’s essential Meaning,
Confessions by St. Augustine
 Instead of murderous men
Or many a yard
Of Kierkegaard
 And the myriad laws of Zen
Or books about bees and how they hive,
Cheap at a dollar-
Ninety-five.

You pack your trunk and you’re at the station
But what do you find for a journey’s ration?
Books by Aeschylus, books by Chaucer,
Books about atom or flying saucer,
Books of poetry, deep books, choice books,
Pre-Renaissance and neo-Joyce books,
In covers chaste and a prose unlurid.
Books that explore my id and your id,
Never hammock or summer-porch books
But Compass, Evergreen, Anchor, Torch Books,
Books by a thousand stylish names
And everywhere, everywhere, Henry James.

O! do you remember Paper Books
 When paper books were thrilling,
When something to read
Was seldom Gide
Or Proust or Peacock
Or Margaret Mead
 And seldom Lionel Trilling?
Gone is the sleuth that cheered our youth
 And the prose that galloped pure.
The flame of our pleasure burns to ash
Since shops are swept of their darling trash
And all we can buy for petty cash
 Is paper Literature.