.. that was a big poem, after all....
Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....
"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."
"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"
"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed
at that--for a time!)
* * * * *
I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had
served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall,
like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had
sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and
tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.
The mass of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too
enormous ... my country's motto was not "beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
but "blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one
bank of violets grew before," ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of
vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet
like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the
"Honest-to-God, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature" ... and
associated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called
familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were
now making him a fortune.
With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand
puddles, making them silver and gold.
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