Putting the Man in Manicule: A Guest Posting by Eric Conrad

In this handy posting from the resident Whitmaniac at P&PC's Midwestern outpost, Eric Conrad looks back at the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and finds the Good Gray Poet pointing the way toward 21st-century corporate branding techniques.

Last summer, Levi’s enlisted Walt Whitman for its highly publicized “Go Forth” campaign, an ambitious set of promotions that appropriated Whitman poetry, photography, and even the sole surviving recording of Whitman's voice. Naturally, this got hearts at the Poetry & Popular Culture home office all aflutter, but not everyone shared the love. Slate’s Seth Stevenson undoubtedly spoke for multitudes when he lamented that Whitman’s appearance as Levi’s “involuntary spokes-celebrity” could easily be considered a “desecration of all [Whitman] stood for.” Stevenson praised Cary Fukunaga’s 60-second film as a “small artistic gem” but ultimately felt it was ruined by “that Levi’s logo at the end.” The critical consensus was clear: branding a bard bordered on blasphemy.

Would Whitman have been so quick to point the same finger? Maybe not. A look back 150 years to the 1860 Leaves of Grass—the third and most aggressively promoted edition of Whitman’s poetry—shows Whitman himself going forth with his own revolutionary blend of poetry and publicity. That year, in fact, the Whitman brand was born—and I’m not talking about chocolates. In and on this edition (and on Leaves of Grass Imprints, a 64-page pamphlet printed to advertise Whitman’s new poems) is, for the first time, the Whitman logo: a butterfly resting on an outstretched index finger. Whitman would revisit and re-enact this image multiple times throughout his life (see the well-known photograph at the end of this posting, for example), but it's the 1860 birth of the butterfly brand that is possibly most striking.

The image has been interpreted in various ways (e.g., a joining of man and nature, a promise of spiritual rebirth), but what folks have so far missed is precisely what would have been most obvious to 19th-century readers—and what would be most disturbing to anyone determined to “save” Whitman and poets from the vagaries of advertising today. Whitman’s butterfly icon that would eventually become nigh synonymous with Whitman himself was first and foremost a manicule, one of the ubiquitous little pointing hands of the marketplace—the most common print and manuscript symbol of the 19th century, and the very appendage of advertising. By 1860, these little hands were pointing their fingers at anything and everything you might want to buy, including Leaves of Grass. The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (1894) defines the function of a “Fist” (the most common name for a manicule produced by a printing press) as “[serving] to call attention to the words following.” In 1860, Whitman aligned his role as a poet with this function of the manicule: both he and the pointing hand transfer value onto what follows them.

The last poem of the 1860 Leaves, “So Long!,” and the manicule that accompanies it, emphasize the ephemeral and contingent nature of Whitman’s poetic project. Here, Whitman admits that all he knows “at any time suffices for that time only—not subsequent time.” “[L]et none be content with me,” he writes, “I myself seek a man better than I am, or a woman better than I am.” The manicule becomes Whitman’s advertisement for “what comes after” his poetry—a finger pointing to a blank page and even beyond the book to “a hundred millions of superb persons” who have yet to exist and to the millions of American promises yet to be fulfilled. With his butterfly adorned-index finger, Whitman turned the most common advertising symbol of the age into a logo for Leaves of Grass.

So, for anyone convinced that Whitman would have given the finger to Levi’s re-branding of his name, remember that in 1860 it was Whitman himself who pointed the way.

Eric Conrad is the new managing editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and member of the Walt Whitman Archive staff. His most recent publication, “Am I Not a Man and a Poet?: A Recently Recovered Whitman Caricature,” appears in the Winter 2010 WWQR.

A Picture of Our Poets

Awhile back, one of the P&PC office interns was reading Cane—the 1923 Jean Toomer book that mixes poems and prose to become what many people would call a "novel" but which we're going to call a collection of poems interspersed with prose—and wondered about a detail in part three of the "Bona and Paul" section (Chapter 28) where Art Carlstrom plays the piano.

In that scene, Art and his friend Paul (who is not only "cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached" but also the story's point of view) are picking up Helen and Bona for a double date in Chicago. While they wait for the girls, Art is asked to play the piano. Here is that passage:

"Come right in, won't you? The young ladies will be right down. Oh, Mr. Carlstrom, do play something for us while you are waiting. We just love to listen to your music. You play so well."

Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night. There is a reason...

Art sat at the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously.

What in the world, our intern wondered, is "the picture of Our Poets"? Is it possible that at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their homes? Or is Toomer making some sort of metaphor here—exercising some sort of, well, poetic license?

We can't say whether or not Toomer had one himself—it's not visible in the office scene above, at least—but we can say that yes, at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their houses. In fact, we finally purchased one (pictured here) for the P&PC Home Office! It's small—just over a foot long and five inches high—and features (left to right) little oval portraits of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The existence of "Our Poets" doesn't mean that Toomer wasn't using the framed piece of home or dormitory sitting-room decor just literally, though, for when Art tears it down at the piano, the sounds of a modern African American art are enough to make the foundations of white American literary history tremble (even when—or especially when?—played by Paul's "red-blooded Norwegian friend"). And is it just us, or is Walt Whitman implicated here as well, as Toomer's "Houses and dorm sitting-rooms" sounds like a jazz riff on "Houses and rooms are full of perfumes" from the beginning of Whitman's "Song of Myself"? All in all, it's a part of Cane that makes us want to dance.

Fiske Matters: P&PC Goes on Tour

In early June, the Poetry & Popular Culture office will be sending a delegate to Fiske Matters: A Conference on John Fiske's Continuing Legacy for Cultural Studies, which is taking place in Madison, Wisconsin, June 11-12.

Our delegate will team up with three other scholars—two of whom you've met at this site before: Catherine Keyser, who in 2009 wrote about lingerie, nursery rhymes, and the new woman, and Melissa Girard, who recently weighed in on the cultural politics of slam poetry—for a panel cryptically titled "Poetry & Popular Culture":

Here is a preview of that panel:

Panel Overview

Linking poetry studies and popular culture studies is not the most intuitive scholarly move, as the two fields rarely seem to overlap and even, at times, appear to have an openly hostile relationship with each other. In the most extreme cases, poetry is presented as an antidote to a debased low or popular culture, and popular culture is offered as a democratic cure to the cartooned elitism of poetry and high culture. However, as we hope to show in this panel, the two fields can do more than simply oppose each other; pairing them can be a provocative and productive endeavor that sheds light on and expands the histories and purviews of both in challenging ways. Indeed, in some cases, poetry is not just a relay point or magnifying glass for issues central to popular culture studies—the culture industries, celebrity, usability, audience participation, reception, etc.—but is a ground upon which popular culture was in fact built.

Poetry has intersected with every medium and facet of popular culture from Hallmark to Hollywood and Vanity Fair to Paris Hilton, and yet, because it is attributed a distinctive identity as a seat of genuine expression, it remains at the same time somewhat separate—a uniquely commodified moment when commodification supposedly gives way to uncommodified utterance. As a historically active site of popular activity, and as a singular discourse within that activity, poetry would seem to be a productive site of critical investigation for scholars of poetry and popular culture alike. This panel offers four examples of what that investigation might look like, each of which draws inspiration for its focus or method from John Fiske’s writing and/or critical legacy.

1) The Arbiters of Paste: Poetry Scrapbooking and Participatory Culture
by Poetry & Popular Culture

John Fiske defined “popular culture” as that culture which “is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life.” One of the central challenges that scholars face is in assessing popular culture in this formulation is amassing evidence of that interface—measuring and recording the types of activities consumers actually do, as well as the various ways that audiences transform the largely homogenized materials of mass culture in the course of everyday life. In this paper, I want to present a largely unknown archive of poetry scrapbooks which offers a material record of this process: evidence of how readers in the first half of the twentieth century artistically and critically repurposed mass-produced poems in large albums of verse that not only served as their age’s version of the mix tape, but that helped establish some of the dynamics of participatory culture that mark popular activity today.

Of particular concern to me is the relationship between ideology and resistance in the activity of poetry scrapbooking. On the one hand, in compiling their personal poetry anthologies, people were encouraged to imagine the activity as an accumulation of literary property that led to middlebrow cultural legitimacy; in fact, the textual act of keeping an album was regularly couched in terms of maintaining and keeping a house—both practices that fostered and relied on the centrality of the bourgeois self. At the same time, given the license to repurpose mass-produced poems, readers constructed albums that empowered critical thinking and challenged social conventions in any number of ways. This is especially the case with albums assembled by women readers, who found in their anthologies a freedom and privacy—a room of their own, as it were—in which to experiment with and explore the new subject positions of modernity.

2) Light Verse, Magazines, and Celebrity: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker
by Catherine Keyser
University of South Carolina

In 1928, Time magazine observed that “for ten years, smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay.” This comment connects reader and poet, public and celebrity, as both use poetry as an emblem of public self-fashioning. John Fiske addressed the contemporary female celebrity and her sexualized body in his essay on Madonna in Reading Popular Culture (1989). The contradictions he recognized in Madonna, a celebrity whose persona conveys both objecthood and agency, resemble the ambiguities that cultural historians trace in the flapper. Emulating Fiske’s attention to traces of domination and resistance in the presentation and reception of celebrities, I analyze poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker as emblems of modern womanhood within mass-market magazines.

With women moving into cities and entering the professions at unprecedented rates, Millay’s light verse about sexuality and mobility became enormously popular in the 1920s. Dorothy Parker cited Millay’s influence on her own career, claiming that she had been “following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” This language of “exquisite”-ness also suggests the vexed link between body image, fashion choices, and professional autonomy in the magazine fantasy of the urbane modern woman. I examine two magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, that provided readers with a vision of modernity and class mobility. Both magazines featured rhetoric prizing smartness, graphics promising luxury, and light verse presenting sexuality and femininity.

I argue that the magazine’s pages demonstrate the iconic roles that Millay and Parker played in the cultural imagination. I use the advertisements and cartoons that variously picture and address the poets’ readers to analyze the kinship proposed between young single women working in the city and modern female poets writing about it. Both Millay and Parker were prominent writers of light verse, a genre found in newspapers and magazines and characterized by formal conventionality, simple diction, and (often) rollicking rhymes. This genre emblematized the energy and insouciance of youth culture, as well as the rebellion and flirtation of the flapper. The simplicity of the genre and its covert aggression—the punch-line or twist at the end of the poem—invited the common reader’s participation and indeed self-invention.

Poetry for Pleasure: Hallmark, Inc. and the Business of Emotion at Mid-Century
by Melissa Girard
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In the 1960s, Hallmark, Inc., purveyor of greeting cards, entered the book publishing industry. Their diverse offerings went far beyond mere gift books; throughout the decade, they issued a variety of highly readable anthologies focusing on Japanese haiku, African American poetry, popular love poems, limericks, and children’s verse, as well as canonical figures such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. Hallmark’s capacious vision stood in stark contrast to their New Critical contemporaries, who, at mid-century, were overwhelmingly preoccupied with narrowing the poetic canon. At a moment when the literary academy had abandoned popular poetry and popular readers almost entirely, Hallmark preserved and fiercely defended what they termed a “democratic” poetics. “The way to read a poem is with an open mind, not an open dictionary,” the editors insist in the 1960 anthology Poetry for Pleasure.

My paper takes Hallmark’s poetics seriously as a democratic alternative to the elitism of the mid- century American academy. I am attentive not only to Hallmark’s poetry anthologies but also to their innovative marketing and advertising campaigns, which placed these attractively packaged and affordable books in supermarkets and drugstores. In so doing, I argue that Hallmark played a vitally important, populist role throughout the 1960s, advocating on behalf of poetry and actively attempting to broaden its readership. At the same time, my paper also explores the complex ramifications of Hallmark’s corporate sponsorship of poetry. While Hallmark undoubtedly empowered the average reader, they also sought to strengthen their brand and, concomitantly, to profit from Americans’ increasing poetic literacy. This “emotion marketing,” as Hallmark terms it, belies their “democratic” agenda. My paper recovers this largely forgotten historical struggle between the academy and corporate America for the hearts and minds of poetry readers.

Poetry vs. Paris Hilton: Who’s On Top?
by Angela Sorby
Marquette University

In 2007, Paris Hilton read a poem on Larry King Live that she had supposedly written in prison. The poem, which turned out to be plagiarized from a fan letter, prompted a media scandal that raises implicit questions about how poetry works, or fails to work, as a popular cultural medium. In Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske argues that, to be popular, a text or commodity must be relevant: it must be functionally available to consumers who make it a meaningful part of their daily lives. In this essay, I will twist Fiske’s thesis to argue that poetry is a functional medium because people are not comfortable using it in their daily lives.

Through an analysis of the Paris Hilton poetry scandal, and of subsequent poems written to (and against) Hilton, I will suggest that precisely because poetry is not “relevant” to most consumers, it arouses strong reactions (disciplinary scorn, passionate defense) when it appears in mass cultural contexts. Poetry, in this case, prompts a breakdown in the ideological unity of an icon such as Paris Hilton, whose popular subjectivity relies on hyper-legibility and relevance.

Little Count Teddy: Dealer in Lecturers, Laughs, Recitals, Poems, Witty Satire, Laughology

Remembering The New Northwest, Part III: Samuel L. Simpson's "The Beautiful Willamette"

Poor Samuel Leonidas Simpson (1845-1899). He was six months old when his family moved from Missouri to the Willamette Valley via the Oregon Trail. His mother reportedly taught him the alphabet by drawing letters in the fireplace ashes. Despite having minimal schooling, he earned a law degree from Willamette University in 1867 and was admitted to the Oregon Bar, but—according to the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest—his law practice failed and he took to newspapers, poetry, and drink; one biographer called him "the most drunken poet, and the most poetical drunkard that ever made the Muses smile or weep." In 1868, a year after completing his law degree, he published "The Beautiful Willamette" in the State Rights Democrat of Albany, Oregon. Forty years later, the Democrat would call that verse "the finest poem ever written in this state."

The "sweet singer of Oregon's beauty" hasn't fared so well in more recent accounts, however, as striving Oregon poets, hot on the trail of modernist literary credibility in the early 20th century, made Simpson a sort of whipping boy for what they thought the region's earlier poetry lacked. James Stevens and H.L. Davis wrote off 19th-century Oregon poetry en toto as nothing but an "avalanche of tripe"; three-quarters of a century later, the University of Washington's John Findlay has pretty much agreed, using Simpson's "The Beautiful Willamette" as the quintessentially bad starting point for the region's literary history. From that beginning, Findlay argues, Pacific Northwest poetry had nowhere to go but up, and, in his estimation, it's done nothing but improve ever since. (See Findlay's essay "Something in the Soil: Literature and Regional Identity in the 20th-Century Pacific Northwest" in the Fall 2006 issue of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly.) We suppose, though, that "Beautiful Willamette" fans don't really have that much to complain about. Unlike other popular poets, at least Simpson made it onto the map, even if his position there is only to signify the dark ages of Oregonian verse that are necessary in the staging of a modernist Renaissance .

Here—before we move on to the 1871 convergence of Simpson's verse and Abigail Scott Duniway's poetry-lovin' suffragist newspaper The New Northwest—is "The Beautiful Willamette":

The Beautiful Willamette

From the Cascades’ frozen gorges,
Leaping like a child at play,
Winding, widening through the valley,
Bright Willamette glides away;
Onward ever,
Lovely river,
Softly calling to the sea;
Time that scars us,
Maims and mars us,
Leaves no track or trench on thee.

Spring’s green witchery is weaving
Braid and border for thy side;
Grace forever haunts thy journey,
Beauty dimples on thy tide;
Through the purple gates of morning
Now thy roseate ripples dance,
Golden, then, when day's departing
On thy waters trails his lance.
Waltzing, flashing,
Tinkling, splashing,
Limpid, volatile, and free—
Always hurried
To be buried
In the bitter, moon-mad sea.

In thy crystal deeps, inverted
Swings a picture of the sky,
Like those wavering hopes of Aidenn,
Dimly in our dreams that lie;
Clouded often, drowned in turmoil,
Faint and lovely, far away—
Wreathing sunshine on the morrow,
Breathing fragrance round to-day.
Love would wander
Here and ponder.
Hither poetry would dream;
Life’s old questions,
Sad suggestions,
"Whence and whither?" throng thy stream.

On the roaring wastes of ocean
Soon thy scattered waves shall toss;
‘Mid the surge’s rhythmic thunder
Shall thy silver tongues be lost.
Oh! Thy glimmering rush of gladness
Mocks this turbid life of mine!
Racing to the wild Forever
Down the sloping paths of Time!
Onward ever,
Lovely river,
Softly calling to the sea;
Time that scars us,
Maims and mars us,
Leaves no track or trench on thee.

So, okay, the description of the Willamette river as "Waltzing, flashing, / Tinkling, splashing, / Limpid, volatile, and free" didn't exactly make the P&PC interns jump for joy when they read it for the first time either. But then they thought a bit more about what it might have meant for readers who encountered it in the pages of The New Northwest on Friday, July 14, 1871. Simpson wasn't a total stranger to The New Northwest; in fact, despite his reputation as a drinker (Duniway's paper was part of the temperance as well as women's suffragist movement), another poem of his, "The Fate of Mississip'," had appeared in the paper just a few weeks before.

For Findlay, "The Beautiful Willamette" was popular because it represents a 19th-century aesthetic that valued poetry for being "good thoughts happily expressed in faultless rhyme and meter." But we here at P&PC can't shake the language in Simpson's first stanza about Time which "scars us, / maims and mars us." Nor can we ignore the fact that the speaker's dreams, in stanza three, are "drowned in turmoil." Ditto "turbid life of mine" in stanza four. Like, how does all that add up to a happy expression of the human condition? Well, it's doesn't, and the speaker of "The Beautiful Willamette" envies the river because (supposedly) the river isn't subject to the scars, maims, and mars of Time's passing as human beings are. For critics like Findlay, Simpson's poem may appear to be a naively waltzing, tinkling, splashing, and limpid set piece of genteel America, but for us, the poem's scars, maims, mars, turmoil and turbidity loom large. We think the tinkling, splashing waters of "The Beautiful Willamette" run much, much deeper than Findlay would like to think.

As the poem's second stanza indicates, those waters also run "free"—a major keyword for The New Northwest and its readers. Could the "freedom" from the scars, maims, and mars of Time in "The Beautiful Willamette" thus be read as a specific type of freedom—the freedom for women to vote, own property, and hold public office? In other words, do the poem's drowned dreams and turbid life read as a conversation about the fight for women's rights?

We believe so—and a look at the issue of The New Northwest in which "The Beautiful Willamette" appeared in fact backs us up. In that very same issue of Duniway's 4-page paper, Frances H. McDougal has published a re-written version of the song "America" that she has re-titled "Song of Freedom: Written for the Fourth of July, 1871." That the poem equates "freedom" in the U.S. with the universal right to vote is clear. Here is McDougal's poem

Freedom, to thee we sing;
Then let our glad notes ring
O’er land and sea,
Till all our Yankee boys
Leave their rude sport and noise,
To learn the higher joys
Of liberty.

Freedom is ours of right,
Her honor and her might
To us belong.
In all this lovely land
The Mind and Working Hand
Shall swell with triumph grand
Our yearly song.

Freedom to live and grow,
Freedom to think and know,
Our Fathers won:
Then let us claim their dower
By manhood’s noblest power,
And build the loftiest tower
Beneath the sun,

Sacred to Human Right,
The honor and thy might,
Majestic Man!—
Whence our great light shall flow
And set the world aglow
With truth it yet must know
By grace or ban

Out from the present spring
Eagles of bolder wing;
All freedom human
That through the ages pined,
At length restored, refined,
Endowed with heart and mind,
Is crowned by woman.

So shall each rolling year
Bring light more fine and clear,
With nobler law.
Quick, with true human fire,
O, may our souls aspire,
Forever high and higher!—
“Excelsior!”

When we read "The Beautiful Willamette" next to "Song of Freedom" today, the two poems can't but speak to each other, as the swelling, growing, flowing, rolling current of McDougal's freedom—which flows "out from the present spring"—finds an appropriate metaphor in the very river that Simpson writes about, and as the "freedom" that Simpson mentions in turn finds its specific referent in the struggle for women's rights. Strike that last part. Simpson's "freedom" doesn't exactly find its specific referent in the women's movement; rather, it is given a specific referent by editor Duniway, who rearticulates the popular verse of Oregon's "sweet singer" to the cause of women's suffrage. That is, while "The Beautiful Willamette" didn't necessarily start out its circulation history as a suffragist poem, by 1871 it had in fact become one.

So, in the end, the problems with Findlay's approach to Simpson are several. In pre- suming that all 19th- century "genteel" poetry fits into a single aesthetic category (lyric poetry with "good thoughts happily expressed"), he misses the actual ability of the poem to signify ambivalently; that is, he only sees that type of poem because he believes that's the only type of poem to see. Furthermore, in isolating that lyric poem from its print and historical contexts, he prevents us from seeing what else "The Beautiful Willamette" might have been. And in dissing "The Beautiful Willamette," Simpson is also pretty much dissing the ways that poetry contributed to progressive social causes like women's suffrage. We here at the P&PC office realize that he—and many other critics like him—needs to oversimplify the popular and the genteel so that the 20th-century "literary" poetry he champions looks better in comparison. But where's the triumph in that?

Little Known Clauses in Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal May 2, 2010 and the Iowa City Press-Citizen May 5, 2010

1.1) Redesign the dollar bill
to get the Latin off the rear.
If you can't spend a buck in English
your money's no good here.

1.2) E pluribus unum is out as well
since Latin can't make us one.
1.3) And Mardi Gras is finis too
since anti-English is anti-fun.

1.4) Say hasta la vista to Ricky Martin
for living La Vida Loca.
1.5) And it's au revoir to Starbucks too
for serving café mocha.

1.6) Ban Twain and Hurston from de schools.
Dose di'lects make us skittish.
1.7) And Shakespeare gets the sack of course
for penning his plays in British.

1.8) Sayonara to taekwondo,
sushi, and haiku.
1.9) And say goodbye to "Arizona"—
it needs an English nombre too.

Remembering The New Northwest, Part II: Don't Quarrel About the Farm

In this Part Two of "Remem- bering The New Northwest," the Poetry & Popular Culture office presents another poem from the weekly, Portland-based, suffragist newspaper edited by mother, wife, teacher, dressmaker, and writer Abigail Scott Duniway between 1871 and 1887. If "The Perplexed Housekeeper" (presented last week) catalogs the uncompensated daily work activities of a 19th-century housewife and thus provides support for her critique of the institution of marriage, then today's poem, "Don't Quarrel about the Farm," takes on another aspect of women's economic vulnearability—the subject of women's property rights (or lack thereof).

"Don't Quarrel about the Farm" struck the P&PC office as notable for a couple of reasons: 1) it uses a story with a happy ending to lobby for reforms in the area of women's property rights (other such poems rely on tragedy or worst-case scenarios to make their arguments, as many family disputes weren't resolved as amicably as this one); and 2) the speaker is a persuasive, articulate daughter/sister who wins her brothers' assent, in the process demonstrating that emotion and intellect are not incompatible in the 19th-century woman and prospective voter. It's precisely this mixture, in fact—an emotional, charitable, and rational calm in the face of people driven primarily by their own personal economic interests—that The New Northwest and other suffragist papers claimed that women would bring to the polls and public discourse if granted their right to vote. Today, of course, we recognize the limitations of that essentialist claim. Nevertheless, the rhetorical clinic that Sis puts on for her brothers in "Don't Quarrel about the Farm" is a pretty stunning one. Enjoy.

Don't Quarrel about the Farm
—Anonymous

"No, brothers, don't fall out 'bout it, or quarrel here today,
Be civil toward each other, and listen to what I say:
You know as well as I do that it's wrong this way to speak,
And if you have disputes to make—why, make them in a week.

"Just wait at least, till father's cold, just put it off—pray do,
And what is yours no doubt you'll get; but wait a day or two.
Have more respect for mother, for she's old and weak and ill,
And don't take foul advantage, just because there is no will.

"Now Freddie, you're the oldest! You should good example show;
For what's the good of quarreling, I'd really like to know?
The money's in the bank—there is no reason to complain
Or the paltry share that's in the home from mother try to gain?

"I'm poorer than the poorest one, yet she shall have my part;
I'll work and toil 'mong strangers with a merry, cheerful heart,
If I only live to know that she can call this place her own;
I'd gladly give her all my share that she may have a home.

"I don't know much about the law, for I never went to school.
And you know more about the ways that's followed as a rule;
I think they'll sell the place right out, and and share it so I’m told.
And that would throw out mother, boys, and leave her in the cold.

"Now I can't see how this is right; she earned as much as he;
She paid, I'm sure, those last three notes endorsed by Squire Lee,
And father often told us so. Besides, he always said
He hoped that she would suffer naught when he was with the dead.

"And that's one reason why, I think, he left no will behind—
Because his boys were rich and therefore would be kind:
He did not wish to give offence by willing all to her,
But thought we here, with one accord, would give and not demur.

"Now I know I'm not a scholar, boys; few things I understand;
I don't know much about real estate, or the price of farming land;
Yet this I know, ten acres with a house and barn and ware,
Will not bring much to nine of us, not counting mother's share.

"I'd like any little part of it—a great deal with it too
For I never had the chance to earn that father gave to you;
No! I always had to stay at home and work the livelong day.
And for it got but board and clothes—that's more than you can say!

"And if I am the youngest one with not a cent ahead,
I’ll give my share to mother now! and go and earn my bread;
And you needn't think because I plead that I just want a home;
No! No! I’ll leave—though hard 'twill be for her to live alone.

"This living 'round with the married sons ain't what it's thought to be!
And mother's old, near sixty years, and not as strong as we;
Besides, she ought to have a home—her own—to live in no one's way,
And be protected from harsh words you all might some times say.

"Then let us give the home to her—come, who will follow me?
I give my share to mother, now! My hand is up, you see!
You're losing but a paltry—a little mite of land—
Whoever's willing, as I am, can raise his own right hand!"

And not a hand remained in place, but up they went as one,
And brothers looked and marveled, and wondered how 'twas done!
All quarrel ceased, the brothers knelt, and found themselves in prayer
For Sis with mother, and the home; and peace came to them there!