Barton County democrat. [volume] (Great Bend, Kan.) 1885-1915, 1890-03-27
ABOUT VERSE-MAKING.
How DR.. Holmes Would Teach the Art I'd
Feeble-Iinded Children.

How DR.. Holmes Would Teach the Art tn
Feeble-Minded Children.
/ gave piece of advice the other day
which 1 said thought deserved para
graph to itself. 1t was from a letter I
wrote not long ago to an unknown
young correspondent. who had long
ing for seeing himself in verse, but was
not hopelessly infatuated with the idea
that he was born poet" ''Wh-z1 you
write in prose-" / said, you say what
you mean. When you write in verse
you say what you must" 1 was think
ing more especially of rhymed verse
Rhythm alone is a tether, and not q
very long one. But rhymes are iron
letters; it is dragging chain and ball
to march under their incumbrance; 1t is
clog-dance you are figuring in, when
you execute your metrical pas seEL
Consider under what a disadvantage
your thinking powers are laboring wheH
you are handicapped by the inexorable
demands of our scanty English rhyming
vocabulary! You want to say something
about the heavenly bodies, and you have
a beautiful line ending with the word
stars. Were you writing in prose, your
imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric,
your musical ear for the harmonies of Ian
guage, would all have full play. But
there is your rhyme fastening you by
the leg, and you must either reject the
line which pleases you, or you must whip
your hobbling fancy and all your limp
ing thoughts into the traces which are
hitched to one of the three or four or
half dozen serviceable words You
can not make any use of cars. i will sup
pose: you have no occasion to talk about
scars; ''the red planet Mars has been
used already; Dibdin has said enough
about the gallant tars, what is there
left for you but barsP So you give uF
your trains of thought, capitulate to
necessity. and manage to lug in some
kind of allusion, in place or out of place,
which will allow you to make use of
bars. Can there be imagined a more
certain process for breaking up all con-
tinuity of thought for taking out all the
vigor, all the virility, which belongs to
natural prose as the vehicle of strong,
graceful, spontaneous thought. than this
miserable subjugation of intellect to
the clink of we'll or i'll matched syli--
ables? 1 think you will smile if
tell you of an idea 1 have had :
about teaching the art of writing
poems to the half-witted children at
the Idiot Asylum. The trick of rhym-
ing can not be more usefully employed
than in furnishing a pleasant amuse-
ment to the poor feeble-mindedc children.
should feel that / was we'll employed
in getting up primer for the pupils of
the asylum, and other young persons
who are incapable of serious thought and
connected expression L would start in
the simplest way; thus:
When darkness walls the evening"
love to close my weary---
The pupil begins by supplying the miss
ing words, which most children who are
able to keep out OF fire and water can
after a certain number of
trials When the poet that is to be has
got so as to perform this task easily, q
skeleton verse, in which two or three
words of each line are omitted, is given
the child to fill up. BY and by the most
difficult forms of meter are outlined. un-
til at length feeble minded child can
make out sonnet, completely equipped
with its four pair of rhymes in the first
section and its three pairs in the second
part--Oiiver Wendell Holmes, in At
lantic.