Vanity

O. Henry

Drop a Tear in This Slot

He who, when torrid Summer's sickly glare

Beat down upon the city's parched walls,

Sat him within a room scarce 8 by 9,

And, with tongue hanging out and panting breath,

Perspiring, pierced by pangs of prickly heat,

Wrote variations of the seaside joke

We all do know and always loved so well,

And of cool breezes and sweet girls that lay

In shady nooks, and pleasant windy coves

Anon

Will in that self-same room, with tattered quilt

Wrapped round him, and blue stiffening hands,

All shivering, fireless, pinched by winter's blasts,

Will hale us forth upon the rounds once more,

So that we may expect it not in vain,

The joke of how with curses deep and coarse

Papa puts up the pipe of parlor stove.

So ye

Who greet with tears this olden favorite,

Drop one for him who, though he strives to please

Must write about the things he never sees.

Vanity

A Poet sang so wondrous sweet

That toiling thousands paused and listened long;

So lofty, strong and noble were his themes,

It seemed that strength supernal swayed his song.

He, god-like, chided poor, weak, weeping man,

And bad him dry his foolish, shameful tears;

Taught that each soul on its proud self should lean,

And from that rampart scorn all earth-born fears.

The Poet grovelled on a fresh heaped mound,

Raised o'er the clay of one he'd fondly loved;

And cursed the world, and drenched the sod with tears

And all the flimsy mockery of his precepts proved.

Hard to Forget

I'm thinking to-night of the old farm, Ned,

And my heart is heavy and sad

As I think of the days that by have fled

Since I was a little lad.

There rises before me each spot I know

Of the old home in the dell,

The fields, and woods, and meadows below

That memory holds so well.

The city is pleasant and lively, Ned,

But what to us is its charm?

To-night all my thoughts are fixed, instead,

On our childhood's old home farm.

I know you are thinking the same, dear Ned,

With your head bowed on your arm,

For to-morrow at four we'll be jerked out of bed

To plow on that darned old farm.

The Pewee

In the hush of the drowsy afternoon,

When the very wind on the breast of June

Lies settled, and hot white tracery

Of the shattered sunlight filters free

Through the unstinted leaves to the pied cool sward;

On a dead tree branch sings the saddest bard

Of the birds that be;

'Tis the lone Pewee.

Its note is a sob, and its note is pitched

In a single key, like a soul bewitched

To a mournful minstrelsy.

"Peewee, Pewee," doth it ever cry;

A sad, sweet minor threnody

That threads the aisles of the dim hot grove

Like a tale of a wrong or a vanished love;

And the fancy comes that the wee dun bird

Perchance was a maid, and her heart was stirred

By some lover's rhyme

In a golden time,

And broke when the world turned false and cold;

And her dreams grew dark and her faith grew cold

In some fairy far-off clime.

And her soul crept into the Pewee's breast;

And forever she cries with a strange unrest

For something lost, in the afternoon;

For something missed from the lavish June;

For the heart that died in the long ago;

For the livelong pain that pierceth so:

Thus the Pewee cries,

While the evening lies

Steeped in the languorous still sunshine,

Rapt, to the leaf and the bough and the vine

Of some hopeless paradise.