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.