THERE is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. Certain Ming products, imperial floor coverings of coach wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something that I like better—a mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballasted animal stand up, similar determination to make a pup eat his meat on the plate. I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford with flamingo colored, maple-leaflike fleet. It reconnoitered like a battle ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were the staple ingredients in its disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was not proof against its proclivity to more fully appraise such bits of food as the stream bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it to eat. I have seen this swan and I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of forms. Happening to stand by an ant hill, I have seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick, north, south, east, west, till it turned on itself, struck out from the flower bed into the lawn, and returned to the point from which it had started. Then abandoning the stick as useless and overtaxing its jaws with a particle of whitewash pill-like but heavy, it again went through the same course of procedure. What is there in being able to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self defense, in proving that one has had the experience of carrying a stick? | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MATRES DOLOROSAE by ROBERT SEYMOUR BRIDGES THE CANTERBURY TALES: THE GENERAL PROLOGUE by GEOFFREY CHAUCER VICTORY BELLS by GRACE HAZARD CONKLING UNDER THE SHADE OF THE TREES [MAY 10, 1863] by MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON ON READING 'VORTICIST POEM ON LOVE' by FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS ALEC YEATON'S SON; GLOUCESTER, AUGUST, 1720 by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH QUATRAIN: AMONG THE PINES by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH |