ALL living creatures seem to throng the road that I would tour along, in my tin chug-mobile; they'll leave their homes and travel far, to throw themselves beneath my car, and bust a costly wheel. All thoroughfares, with mules and goats, and sheep and hens and calves and shotes, forevermore are packed; I just collided with a cow—against her adamantine brow, my radiator cracked. The cows will leave the tender grass to block the road where I must pass, upon my road to town; the hogs will leave their sparkling swill to make a stand on yonder hill, and turn me upside down. Anon I squash a farmer's hen, that surely wasn't worth a yen, when it was in its prime; but now I hear the owner howl. "You killed my rare imported fowl, of pedigree sublime!" I jog along and break the slats of dogs and ducks and geese and cats, and always, when they die, the price goes up to beat the band; "They were the finest in the land," I hear the owners cry. The way the farmers' beasts run loose is certainly a great abuse, it is no more a joke; and if I travel west or east, at every corner there's a beast that's suffering to croak. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE SERGEANT'S WEDDIN' by RUDYARD KIPLING HON. MR. SUCKLETHUMBKIN'S STORY: THE EXECUTION; A SPORTING ANECDOTE by RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM NO-MORE-FEAR by WILLIAM ROSE BENET IN MY LADY'S PRAISE by WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE THE ORGANIST IN HEAVEN (SAMUEL SEBASTIAN WESLEY) by THOMAS EDWARD BROWN ON TRINITY SUNDAY (1) by JOHN BYROM |