Annotated Edition

by STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT

AND there it is and could be worse
With notes and preface and the rest
And every kind of teacher’s aid
To harry schoolboys into learning
The unpremeditated verse
Written because the heart was hot
With quite a different kind of burning,
And that is the revenge of time
And that, they say, the workman’s pay,

It may be so, I wouldn’t know.
1 wrote it poor, in love, and young,
In indigestion and despair
And exaltation of the mind,
Not for the blind to lead the blind;
1 have no quarrel with the wise,
No quarrel with the pedagogue,
And yet I wrote for none of these.

And yet there arc the words, in print,
And should an obdurate old man
Remember half a dozen lines
Stuck in his mind like thistle-seed,
Or il, perhaps, some idle boy
Should sometime read a page or so
In the deep summer, to his girl,
And drop the book half finished there
Since kissing was a better joy,
Why, I shall have been paid enough.
J II have been paid enough indeed.