The polecat, sovereign of its native wood,
Dashes damnation upon bad and good;
The health of all the upas trees impairs
By exhalations deadlier than theirs;
Poisons the rattlesnake and warts the
toad—
The creeks go rotten and the rocks corrode!
She shakes o’er breathless hill
and shrinking dale
The horrid aspergillus of her tail!
From every saturated hair, till dry,
The spargent fragrances divergent fly,
Deafen the earth and scream along the
sky!
Removed to alien scenes, amid the strife
Of urban odors to ungladden life—
Where gas and sewers and dead dogs conspire
The flesh to torture and the soul to fire—
Where all the “well defined and
several stinks”
Known to mankind hold revel and high jinks—
Humbled in spirit, smitten with a sense
Of lost distinction, leveled eminence,
She suddenly resigns her baleful trust,
Nor ever lays again our mortal dust.
Her powers atrophied, her vigor sunk,
She lives deodorized, a sweeter skunk.
A “MUTE INGLORIOUS MILTON.”
“O, I’m the Unaverage Man,
But you never have heard of
me,
For my brother, the Average Man, outran
My fame with rapiditee,
And I’m sunk in Oblivion’s
sea,
But my bully big brother the world can
span
With his wide notorietee.
I do everything that I can
To make ’em attend to
me,
But the papers ignore the Unaverage Man
With a weird uniformitee.”
So sang with a dolorous note
A voice that I heard from
the beach;
On the sable waters it seemed to float
Like a mortal part of speech.
The sea was Oblivion’s sea,
And I cried as I plunged to
swim:
“The Unaverage Man shall reside
with me.”
But he didn’t—I
stayed with him!
