Edwin Meade Robinson
Edwin Meade Robinson (no relation to Edwin Arlington Robinson) was born November 1, 1879, at Lima, Indiana. He engaged in newspaper work when he was scarcely out of his ’teens, joining the staff of the Indianapolis Sentinel in 1901. He began writing a daily poem in 1904 and, for years, has conducted a column of prose and verse in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Mere Melodies (1918) is a collection of Robinson’s light and sentimental verse, an uneven collection. Piping and Panning (1920) is a much fresher and far more vigorous assembling of this versifier’s humorous and burlesque idioms. One of our most adroit technicians, he is especially happy in interior rhyming; a poem like “Halcyon Days” contains, beside the end-rhymes, rhymes hidden within the lines and others running over from line to line.
How He Turned Out
When he was young, his parents saw (as parents by the million see)
That Rollo had an intellect of quite unequaled brilliancy;
They started in his training from the hour of his nativity,
And carefully they cultivated every bright proclivity.
At eight, he ate up authors like a literary cannibal,
At nine he mastered Latin as the Latins mastered Hannibal;
At ten he knew astronomy and differential calculus,
And at eleven could dissect the tiniest animalculus.
At twelve, he learned orthometry, and started in to master all
The different kinds of poetry, the lyric and the pastoral,
The epic and dramatic, the descriptive and didactical,
With lessons theoretical and exercises practical.
Music he learned—the old and sweet, the up-to-date and hideous;
He painted like Apelles and he modeled like a Phidias;
In language he was polyglot, in rhetoric Johnsonian,
In eloquence Websterian, in diction Ciceronian.
At last, with learning that would set an ordinary head agog,
His education far outshone his most proficient pedagog;
And so he entered life, with all his lore to lift the lid for him—
And what do you imagine that his erudition did for him?
Alas! I fear the truth will shock you, rather than amuse you all—
To those who’ve read this sort of verse, the sequel is unusual.
This man (it’s hard on humor, for it breaks the well known laws of it!)
Was happier for his learning, and a great success because of it!
“Halcyon Days”
Ere yet the giants of modern science had gone a-slumming in smelly slums,
And through the Ghettos and lazarettos had put in plumbing (and pulled out plums!)
When wily wizards in inky vizards employed their talents at homicide,
And poisoned goblets for faithless squablets by knightly gallants were justified;
When maids were fairest, and baths were rarest, and thaumaturgy was wrought by dames,
When courts were rotten and faith forgotten, and none but clergy could write their names—
When he who flouted the Church, or doubted, would find his neck fast in hempen ruff,
And saint and sinner thought eggs for dinner and beer for breakfast the proper stuff;
When men were scary of witch and fairy, of haunted castle, of spook and elf,
When every mixer of cough-elixir was thought a vassal of Nick himself;
When income taxes and prophylaxis and Comic Sections were yet unborn,
When Leagues of Nations and Spring Vacations and Fall Elections were held in scorn—
When all brave fellows would fight duellos with sword and dagger, with lance and mace,
When good men guzzled until, clean fuzzled, they’d reel and stagger about the place;
When pious journeys and jousts and tourneys brought high adventure and secret tryst,
When knives were many, but forks not any—’twas fist to trencher, and mouth to fist!—
Oh, men had chances for true romances, for fame and glory, and knightly acts...
(And childish quarrels and beastly morals, if song and story would stick to facts!)