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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
PARADE THE NARROW TURRETS, by LUCIA TRENT
First Line: Thumb over your well-worn classics with clammy and accurate eyes
Last Line: And parade the narrow turrets as a cultivated man!
Alternate Author Name(s): Cheyney, Mrs. Ralph; Glass, Mrs. Ernest
Subject(s): Academia; Sacco-vanzetti Case (1921); Social Protest
First Line: Thumb over your well-worn classics with clammy and accurate eyes
Last Line: And parade the narrow turrets as a cultivated man!
Alternate Author Name(s): Cheyney, Mrs. Ralph; Glass, Mrs. Ernest
Subject(s): Academia; Sacco-vanzetti Case (1921); Social Protest
Thumb over your well-worn classics with clammy and accurate eyes,
Teach Freshmen to scan Homer and Horace and look wise.
Dress in your new Tuxedo as gauchely as you please.
And at official dinners kowtow to fat trustees.
Wince at the Evening Graphic, whose bold pink pages shriek,
Frown on the drooping shopgirl, rouging her lip and cheek.
Lecture to the gray-haired ladies on ruins of ancient Rome,
And preach across a tea-cup on the sanctity of home.
What do you care if miner's brats shudder and starve and die.
What do you care if blacks are lynched beneath a withering sky?
What do you care if two men burn to death in a great steel chair
While the world shouts their innocence and honest men despair?
Go live in your Ivory Tower. Build it high as you can,
And parade the narrow turrets as a cultivated man!
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