Impertinent Poems. Cooke Edmund Vance

question is how you strive.

      Are you up to your eyes in a wild romance?

      Does your lady lead you a dallying dance?

      Do you question if love be fate, or chance?

      Oh, the world will ask: "Did he get the girl?"

      Though gentleman, coxcomb, clown or churl,

      Master or menial of passion's whirl.

      But it isn't that. The world will run

      Though you never bequeath it daughter or son,

      But what, O lover, will come to you

      If you be not chivalrous, honest, true?

      As far ahead as a man may think,

      You can see your little soul shrivel and shrink.

      It's not, "Do you win?"

      It is, "What have you been?"

      Are you stripped for the world-old, world-wide race

      For the metal which shines like the sun's own face

      Till it dazzles us blind to the mean and base?

      Do you say to yourself, "When I have my hoard,

      I will give of the plenty which I have stored,

      If the Lord bless me, I will bless the Lord"?

      And do you forget, as you pile your pelf,

      What is the gift you are giving yourself?

      Though your mountain of gold may dazzle the day,

      Can you climb its height with your feet of clay?

      Oh, it isn't the stamp on the metal you win;

      It's the stamp on the metal you coin within.

      It's not what you give;

      It is "What do you live?"

      Are you going to sail the polar seas

      To the point of ninety-and-north degrees,

      Where the very words in your larynx freeze?

      Well, the mob may ask "Did he reach the pole?

      Though fair, or foul, did he touch the goal?"

      But if that be the spirit which stirs your soul,

      Off, off from the land below the zeroes;

      For you are not of the stuff of heroes.

      Ho! many a man can lead men forth

      To the fearsome end of the Farthest North,

      But can you be faithful for woe or weal

      In a land where nothing but self is leal?

      Oh, it isn't "How far?"

      It is what you are.

      And it isn't your lookout where you arrive,

      But it's up to you as to how you strive.

      THE GRILL

      Why do you?

      What's it to you?

      I know you do, for I've seen the gruesome feeling simmer through you.

      I've seen it rise behind your eyes

      And take your features by surprise.

      I've seen it in your half-hid grin

      And the tilting-upness of your chin.

      Good-natured though you are and fair, as you have often boasted,

      Still you like to hear the other man artistically roasted.

      Whenever the star secures the stage with the spotlight in the centre,

      Why should the anvil chorus think it has the cue to enter?

      Whenever the prima donna trills the E above the clef,

      Why should the brasses orchestrate the bass in double f?

      It's funny,

      But it's even money,

      You like to spy the buzzing fly in the other fellow's honey.

      Though you have said that honest bread

      Demands no honey on it spread,

      And if we eat the crusty wheat

      With appetite, it needs no sweet,

      Still I have noticed you were not at all inclined to cry

      Because the man the bees had blest was bothered with the fly.

      Whenever the chef concocts a dish which sets the world to tasting,

      Why does the cooking-school get out its recipes for basting?

      Whenever a sprinter beats the bunch from the pistol-shot, why is it

      The heavy hammer throwers get together for a visit?

      Excuse me!

      Did you accuse me

      Of turning the spit a little bit myself? Why, you amuse me!

      Didn't I scratch the sulphurous match

      And blow the flame to make it catch?

      Didn't you trot to get the pot

      To heat the water good and hot?

      Then, seizing on our victim, if we found no greater sin,

      Didn't we call him "a lobster," and cheerfully chuck him in?

      THE VISION

      At the door of Success, I've been tempted to knock

      Both the door and the man who went through it,

      But I find that the fellow was greasing the lock

      All the time that he strove to undo it,

      So I either stay out, or must look for the key

      Which slipped back the bolt which impeded,

      And I'm certain to find it, as soon as I see

      The reason my rival succeeded.

      Yes, I own when the man is a rank also-ran