Arthur Guiterman

The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup
Were playing in the garden when the Bunny gamboled up;
...

The hippopotamus is strong
And huge of head and broad of bustle;
The limbs on which he rolls along
Are big with hippopotomuscle.
...

Learn this now before you are older:
Don’t go through life with a chip on your shoulder,
Always aggrieved and ever offended,
...

The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
...

Amœbas at the start
Were not complex;
They tore themselves apart
And started Sex.

And Sex has ruled the earth
From then till this,
Producing ...
...

The planets are bells on his motley,
He fleers at the stars in their state,
He banters the suns burning hotly-
The Jester whose nickname is Fate.
...

Because on the branch that is tapping my pane
   A sun-wakened leaf-bud, uncurled,
Is bursting its rusty brown sheathing in twain,
   I know there is Spring in the world.
...

The Deer don't dine
When a Wolf's about,
And the Porcupine
Sticks his quill-points out.
...

I never loved your plains!--
Your gentle valleys,
Your drowsy country lanes
And pleachéd alleys.
...

Great god whom I shall carve from this gray stone
   Wherein thou liest, hid to all but me,
Grant thou that when my art hath made thee known
   And others bow, I shall not worship thee.
...

Across the sands of Syria,
Or possibly Algeria,
Or some benighted neighborhood of barrenness and drouth,
There came the Prophet Samu-u-el
...

This is the land that we love; here our fathers found refuge,
Here are the grooves of their plows and the mounds of their graves;
...

The Great Tyrannosaurus
Lived centuries ago;
Through marshes wet and porous
He rambled to and fro.
...

The General came in a new tin hat
To the shell-torn front where the war was at;
With a faithful Aide at his good right hand
...

In life there's naught
That's true, but Thought;
The Things we build on do but seem,
...

What one approves,
another scorns,
and thus
his nature each discloses.
...

The primitive Pithecanthropus erectus,
With whom the ethnologists rightly connect us,
Defended his own
...

On order that must be obeyed
I sing of a dear little maid;
A mirthfully serious,
...

The three-toed tree-toad
Sings his sweet ode
To the moon;
...

I saw a Melancholy Wasp
Upon a Purple Clover Knosp,
Who wept, 'The Poets do me Wrong,
Excluding me from Noble Song-
...