Word: parson
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...Fall River Line, on the old Fall River Line, I fell for Susie's line of talk, and Susie fell for mine; Then we fell in with a parson, and he tied us tight as twine, But I wish, oh Lord! I fell overboard, On the old Fall River Line. One day last week the 426-ft. Priscilla, one of the matriarchs of the Fall River Line (water wheels and feathering buckets, double-inclined compound engine, 95-inch cylinders and eleven-foot stroke) moved with stateliness up New York's East River, as if ignoring the ignominious fact...
YOUNG MEN are impatient with convention. The whole age is impatient with convention, or what it understands by the term. Yet Professor Lowes' course in Nineteenth Century poetry remains paradoxically popular. Mr. Parson's book (his first, by the way) is dedicated to Mr. Lowes . . . "who, in an age of revolt, eloquently defends the beauty of convention." The dedication is deserved, the book not unworthy of its dedicates...
...Parson is not a young man as undergraduates count a man's years. Yet his verse has these qualities of a young man's verse: it is frankly derivative, it is fresh, it is largely emotional. Mr. Parson's prosodic and critical models happen to be Keats and John Lowes rather than Pound and Eliot. And a reading of this book, in comparison with much of the young men's verse of today, makes one wonder if Mr. Parson's preference is not something more than respectable...
There are Keatsean echoes in the title poem. And more than echoes. Here is a poet at work on one of the curious monuments of our times, giving it that inner meaning without which nothing is worth anything. Indeed, it is this reviewer's opinion that Mr. Parson poem ought to be exhibited along with the glass flowers themselves; that every viewer of these "mimic plants" ought to read this poem as he stares in curious fascination at them. For Mr. Parson has symbolized them, has defined them as the idle curiosity they really are, their verisimilitude to nature only...
...thin book, and one wishes it were even thinner, for Mr. Parson's verse sometimes betrays another characteristic of young men's verse: an ineptitude with, and reliance upon, adjectives. Yet his average is high, and his best poems are those that are consistently good; his unevenness is confined mostly to the shorter lyrics. He is at his best in the sonnet -- there are a dozen that are really good...