Life, 1900-07-19 · page 12 of 22
Life — July 19, 1900 — page 12: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis of Life Magazine Page 52 **"To a Poet"** (top right): A poem by Carolyn Wells mocking a male poet's self-aggrandizing descriptions. He claims his "lips are like twin cherries" and his "eyes like stars," but the speaker—apparently a woman—deflates his vanity by pointing out these comparisons are absurd (cherries don't look like lips; his eyes aren't literally starlight). The satire targets overwrought Romantic poetry and masculine pretension. **"Is There One Among You?"** (left): An illustration of stacked books asks whether any reader has actually completed the "great" authors listed (Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Cervantes, etc.). The accompanying text humorously argues that life is too short to read all these volumes—it would take nearly four years of constant reading. The satire mocks both literary pretension and the impracticality of "serious" reading in modern life.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Beetle: ereapy, MEN, THERE SUB BLOWS! Is There One Among You? FLOW many of the dest books has any- one read through? is a question seriously propounded by an English literary skeptic, and it fairly takes our breath away to answer it. Who has really read Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Homer, Goethe, Cervantes, Montaigne, Field- ing, Smollett, Gibbon, Emer- son, Macaulay, Thucydides, Boswell, Bacon, Spencer, Kant, Thackeray, Guizot, & Hume, Shelley, Byron, Chau- cer, Balzac, and a host—nay, several hosts—of others, right through from beginning to end, and lived to tell the tale? The answer is, Noone. No one ever wanted to in the first place, but, more important than this, no one ever could, Roughly speaking, there are a thousand books of a hundred pages on the average that a man ought to read, and if he read twenty-five pages an hoar—which is good reading when one digests and assimilates properly—it would take a man two thousand days, working two hours a day, or nearly four years, to do this awful task. When we have played golf, earned a few slices of daily bread, read the papers and the latest successfnl novel, ate and slept and gossiped, and ameliorated the servants, and ordered clothes, and fought the devil, what time is there for cloying ourselves with the To a Poet. FROM OULCINEA, PLET although you've been extremely kind, The time has come when T must speak my mind, I think it is absurd for you to write My “lips are like twin cherries,”—whata sight I'd be if such a silly thing were true! Do cherries really look like lips to you? ‘Then, “shell-like cars!" To the marines, pray tell, My car is like a hard and slimy shell! My eyes are not two yellow dots of light. And I confess it gives me quite a twinge Just to imagine “ lids with jetty fringe.” “Hair like a raven's wing!" Fancy a maid With short, stiff quills that wouldn't coil or braid ! And I would be the most distressed of girls Were my teeth small and spherical “like pearls.” As to my neck, you really should be told "Tis not “like alabaster,” hard and cold. Then, “arms like ivory!” Candid, I must own! Why don’t you say they're nothing but a bone? Oh, prithce, Poet, if you think me fair, With better things than these my charins compare ! Carolyn Wells, «¢T HEY say Miss Singleton is a transmigrationist.”” “Yes! She thinks she must once have been the wicked flea whom no man pursueth !”? DISTRICT MESSENGER SERVICE IN ILOILO. “With eyes like stars!" Indeed, sir, even at * comicbooks.com