False to his art and to the high command
God laid upon him, Markham’s rebel
hand
Beats all in vain the harp he touched
before:
It yields a jingle and it yields no more.
No more the strings beneath his finger-tips
Sing harmonies divine. No more his
lips,
Touched with a living coal from sacred
fires,
Lead the sweet chorus of the golden wires.
The voice is raucous and the phrases squeak;
They labor, they complain, they sweat,
they reek!
The more the wayward, disobedient song
Errs from the right to celebrate the wrong,
More diligently still the singer strums,
To drown the horrid sound, with all his
thumbs.
Gods, what a spectacle! The angels
lean
Out of high Heaven to view the sorry scene,
And Israfel, “whose heart-strings
are a lute,”
Though now compassion makes their music
mute,
Among the weeping company appears,
Pearls in his eyes and cotton in his ears.
AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE.
Once I “dipt into the future far
as human eye could see,”
And saw—it was not Sandow,
nor John Sullivan, but she—
The Emancipated Woman, who was weeping
as she ran
Here and there for the discovery of Expurgated
Man.
But the sun of Evolution ever rose and
ever set,
And that tardiest of mortals hadn’t
evoluted yet.
Hence the tears that she cascaded, hence
the sighs that tore apart
All the tendinous connections of her indurated
heart.
Cried Emancipated Woman, as she wearied
of the search:
“In Advancing I have left myself
distinctly in the lurch!
Seeking still a worthy partner, from the
land of brutes and dudes
I have penetrated rashly into manless
solitudes.
Now without a mate of any kind where am
I?—that’s to say,
Where shall I be to-morrow?—where
exert my rightful sway
And the purifying strength of my emancipated
mind?
Can solitude be lifted up, vacuity refined?
Calling, calling from the shadows in the
rear of my Advance—
From the Region of Unprogress in the Dark
Domain of Chance—
Long I heard the Unevolvable beseeching
my return
To share the degradation he’s reluctant
to unlearn.
But I fancy I detected—though
I pray it wasn’t that—
A low reverberation, like an echo in a
hat.
So I’ve held my way regardless,
evoluting year by year,
Till I’m what you now behold me—or
would if you were here—
A condensed Emancipation and a Purifier
proud
An Independent Entity appropriately loud!
Independent? Yes, in spirit, but
(O, woful, woful state!)
Doomed to premature extinction by privation
of a mate—
To extinction or reversion, for Unexpurgated
Man
Still awaits me in the backward if I sicken
of the van.
O the horrible dilemma!—to
be odiously linked
With an Undeveloped Species, or become
a Type Extinct!”
As Emancipated Woman wailed her sorrow
to the air,
Stalking out of desolation came a being
strange and rare—
Plato’s Man!—bipedal,
featherless from mandible to rump,
Its wings two quilless flippers and its
tail a plumeless stump.
First it scratched and then it clucked,
as if in hospitable terms
It invited her to banquet on imaginary
worms.
Then it strutted up before her with a
lifting of the head,
And in accents of affection and of sympathy
it said:
“My estate is some ’at ’umble,
but I’m qualified to draw
Near the hymeneal altar and whack up my
heart and claw
To Emancipated Anything as walks upon
the earth;
And them things is at your service for
whatever they are worth.
I’m sure to be congenial, marm,
nor e’er deserve a scowl—
I’m Emancipated Rooster, I am Expurgated
Fowl!”
From the future and its wonders I withdrew
my gaze, and then
Wrote this wild unfestive prophecy about
the Coming Hen.
