Poem of the Day: ‘To a Thesaurus’

Over the past two years here in The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day feature, we’ve run several poems by newspaper columnists — recollecting the days in which newspapers would fairly often break into verse. It was a time, lasting well into the 20th century, in which every literate person was expected to be able to produce, if not great poetry, then at least poems that were correct in meter and rhyme, when the occasion demanded.The greatest of those newspaper poets remains, we chauvinistically think, the Sun’s own Don Marquis (1878–1937), but no one can set aside Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) as a master of the genre. As we explained when we featured “Monotonous Variety,” his complaint about fiction writers’ word choice, and “A Ballad of Baseball Burdens,” Adams was a Manhattan newspaper columnist back when that was very much a gig that mattered. Adams filled his columns with witty and clever accounts of the social world of New York and the state of American literature. He also published his own clever and comic poetry in his books and the papers for which he worked, including his most famous verse, “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” a 1910 baseball wail about the Chicago Cubs’ infield, from a New York Giants’ fan.In “To a Thesaurus,” one of the lighter verses we offer as Poem of the Day on Wednesdays, Adams offers 32 lines of tetrameter, rhymed in abab quatrains, in praise of a thesaurus — written, naturally, with recourse to that thesaurus: “For I would pen, engross, indite, / Transcribe, set forth, compose, address, / Record, submit — yea, even write / An ode.”To a Thesaurusby Franklin Pierce AdamsO precious codex, volume, tome,Book, writing, compilation, work,Attend the while I pen a pome,A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.For I would pen, engross, indite,Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,Record, submit — yea, even writeAn ode, an elegy to bless — To bless, set store by, celebrate,Approve, esteem, endow with soul,Commend, acclaim, appreciate,Immortalize, laud, praise, extolThy merit, goodness, value, worth,Experience, utility — O manna, honey, salt of earth,I sing, I chant, I worship thee!How could I manage, live, exist,Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,Be present in the flesh, subsist,Have place, become, breathe or inhaleWithout thy help, recruit, support,Opitulation, furtherance,Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,Favour, sustention, and advance?Alack! Alack! and well-a-day!My case would then be dour and sad,Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.Though I could keep this up all day,This lyric, elegiac, song,Meseems hath come the time to sayFarewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘To a Thesaurus’

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