Bert Leston Taylor
Reading edition
Bert Leston Taylor was born at Goshen, Massachusetts, November 13, 1866, and educated at the College of the City of New York. He had been engaged in journalism since 1895, conducting his column “A Line o’ Type or Two” in the Chicago Daily Tribune. He was the author of two novels as well as A Line-o’-Verse or Two (1911) and Motley Measures (1913), a pair of delightful light verse collections.
Taylor died of pneumonia March 19, 1921.
CANOPUS
When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,
I like to think about that star Canopus,
So far, so far away.
Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list ’em;
To weigh it, science almost must despair.
Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system,
Nor even know ’twas there.
102When temporary chairmen utter speeches,
And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns,
My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches
To where Canopus swims.
When men are calling names and making faces,
And all the world’s ajangle and ajar,
I meditate on interstellar spaces
And smoke a mild seegar.
For after one has had about a week of
The argument of friends as well as foes,
A star that has no parallax to speak of
Conduces to repose.