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.”

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1959, A Pocketful of Wry.

Inventors, Keep Away From My Door

Ah, where’s the patented device
 That I can learn to master?
My icebox yields me melted ice,
 My oven, but disaster.
From stranded cars it is my fate
 To view the rural scenery;
For I’m the poor unfortunate
 Undone by all machinery.

Other people’s robots keep a willing head up.
 All their cheerful keyholes welcome in the key.
Other people’s toasters do not burn their bread up.
 But nothing ever works for me.

The gadgets come, the gadgets go,
 Ambitious for the attic.
Tune up my stubborn radio —
 It screams with rage and static.
The vacuum sweeper roundabout
 With slippery strength encoils me.
Locks treacherously lock me out.
 The simple corkscrew foils me.

Other people’s mousetraps sometimes bring a mouse down.
 Other people’s furnaces sing in cozy glee.
Mine huffs and it puffs till it brings the quaking house down.
 Nothing ever runs for me.

The humblest tools in my abode
 Know half a hundred ruses
To leak or sputter or explode,
 Catch fire or short their fuses.
In all things made of steel or wire,
 Inanimate, unholy,
There lurks some dark, ancestral ire
 Directed at me, solely;
There lurks some black, malicious spite
 Amid the wheels and prisms,
And what shall save me from the might
 Of wrathful mechanisms?

Other people’s watches do not send them late for
 Amorous appointment or literary tea.
Other people’s telephones bring the word they wait for.
 But nothing ever works for me.

New at IWP Books: The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, 1954.

in praise of diversity

Since this ingenious earth began
 To shape itself from fire and rubble;
Since God invented man, and man
 At once fell to, inventing trouble,
One virtue, one subversive grace
Has chiefly vexed the human race.

One whimsical beatitude,
 Concocted for his gain and glory,
Has man most stoutly misconstrued
 Of all the primal category —
Counting no blessing, but a flaw,
That Difference is the mortal law.

Adam, perhaps, while toiling late,
 With life a book still strange to read in,
Saw his new world, how variegate,
 And mourned, “It was not so in Eden,”
Confusing thus from the beginning
Unlikeness with original sinning.

And still the sons of Adam’s clay
 Labor in person or by proxy
At altering to a common way
 The planet’s holy heterodoxy.
Till now, so dogged is the breed,
Almost it seems that they succeed.

One shrill, monotonous, level note
 The human orchestra’s reduced to.
Man casts his ballot, turns his coat,
 Gets born, gets buried as he used to,
Makes war, makes love — but with a kind
Of masked and universal mind.

His good has no nuances. He
 Doubts or believes with total passion.
Heretics choose for heresy
 Whatever’s the prevailing fashion.
Those wearing Tolerance for a label
Call other views intolerable.

“For or Against” ’s the only rule.
 Damned are the unconvinced, the floaters.
Now all must go to public school,
 March with the League of Women Voters,
Or else for safety get allied
With a unanimous Other Side.

There’s white, there’s black; no tint between.
 Truth is a plane that was a prism.
All’s Blanshard that’s not Bishop Sheen.
 All’s treason that’s not patriotism.
Faith, charity, hope — now all must fit
One pattern or its opposite.

Or so it seems. Yet who would dare
 Deny that nature planned it other,
When every freckled thrush can wear
 A dapple various from his brother,
When each pale snowflake in the storm
Is false to some imagined norm?

Recalling then what surely was
 The earliest bounty of Creation:
That not a blade among the grass
 But flaunts its difference with elation,
Let us devoutly take no blame
If similar does not mean the same.

And grateful for the wit to see
 Prospects through doors we cannot enter,
Ah! let us praise Diversity
 Which holds the world upon its center.
Praise con amor or furioso
The large, the little, and the soso.

Rejoice that under cloud and star
 The planet’s more than Maine or Texas.
Bless the delightful fact there are
 Twelve months, nine muses, and two sexes;
And infinite in earth’s dominions
Arts, climates, wonders, and opinions.

Praise ice and ember, sand and rock,
 Tiger and dove and ends and sources;
Space travelers, and who only walk
 Like mailmen round familiar courses;
Praise vintage grapes and tavern Grappas,
And bankers and Phi Beta Kappas;

Each in its moment justified,
 Praise knowledge, theory, second guesses;
That which must wither or abide;
 Prim men, and men like wildernesses;
And men of peace and men of mayhem
And pipers and the ones who pay ’em.

Praise the disheveled, praise the sleek;
 Austerity and hearts-and-flowers;
People who turn the other cheek
 And extroverts who take cold showers;
Saints we can name a holy day for
And infidels the saints can pray for.

Praise youth for pulling things apart,
 Toppling the idols, breaking leases;
Then from the upset apple-cart
 Praise oldsters picking up the pieces.
Praise wisdom, hard to be a friend to,
And folly one can condescend to.

Praise what conforms and what is odd,
 Remembering, if the weather worsens
Along the way, that even God
 Is said to be three separate Persons.
Then upright or upon the knee,
Praise Him that by His courtesy,
For all our prejudice and pains,
Diverse His Creature still remains.

New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1946, Stones from a Glass House.

tiger, tiger

Verses composed upon hearing that the Association for Childhood Education, as well as other groups, was calling Little Black Sambo an “undesirable book,” because “it disseminates racial and religious prejudices.”

Little Black Sambo, mind your cues;
 Behave like a wary fella.
Hold on tight to those purple shoes,
 That beautiful green umbrella.
Better be careful, better not bungle,
Strolling soft through this civilized jungle.
Branches bow
 And the grass is hollowed.
Don’t look now
 But I think you’re followed.
Something’s after you, angrier far
Than even your fabulous tigers are —
A striped thing with a public cry
And a hot, fanatical tiger eye,
That lives in bluster and dwells in storm.
And one of its names is called Reform.

Oh, one of its names’s Self-Righteousness.
 It feeds on the flesh of rumor
And quite makes up in its zeal, I guess,
 What it lacks in a sense of humor.
Loose in the world, it prowls and pants,
Terming intolerance Tolerance,
Or out of its lair
 Comes daily tumbling
To fill the air
 With enormous rumbling.
So listen, listen, Little Black Sambo.
Take it hastily on the lam, bo.
Whiten your dark, endearing face.
Hide in the bush, deny your race.
For that which formerly hunted witches
Bays on the trail of your sky-blue britches.

Hit for shelter, but as you do so,
Shout a warning to Robinson Crusoe.
Bid him tidy
 The footprints, straight,
Or Good Man Frid’y
 Will share your fate.
Close the covers on Mr. Kipling,
Calling to Mowgli, the sunburnt stripling.
Snatch the palm
 (May the Lord redeem us!)
From Uncle Tom
 And from Uncle Remus,
Epaminondas, and, just to be sure,
Maybe Othello, the noble Moor.
The peril stalks.
 It will soon have treed’ em.
For though it walks
 In the clothes of freedom
And wears a bright, respectable name,
It’s a full-grown tiger just the same.