AT THE CLOSE OF THE CANVASS

by: Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

      'WAS a Venerable Person, whom I met one Sunday morning,
      All appareled as a prophet of a melancholy sect;
      And in a Jeremiad of objurgatory warning
      He lifted up his jodel to the following effect:
       
      "O ye sanguinary statesmen, intermit your verbal tussles!
      O ye editors and orators, consent to hear my lay!
      Rest a little while the digital and maxillary muscles
      And attend to what a Venerable Person has to say.
       
      "Cease your writing, cease your shouting, cease your wild unearthly lying;
      Cease to bandy such expressions as are never, never found
      In the letter of a lover; cease "exposing" and "replying"
      Let there be abated fury and a decrement of sound.
       
      "For to-morrow will by Monday and the fifth day of November--
      Only day of opportunity before the final rush.
      Carpe diem! go conciliate each person who's a member
      Of the other party--do so while you can without a blush.
       
      "Lo! the time is close upon you when the madness of the season
      Having howled itself to silence like a Minnesota 'clone,
      Will at last be superseded by the still, small voice of reason,
      When the whelpage of your folly you would willingly disown.
       
      "Ah, 'tis mournful to consider what remorses will be thronging,
      With a consciousness of having been so ghastly indiscreet,
      When by accident untoward two ex-gentlemen belonging
      To the opposite political denominations meet!
       
      "Yes, 'tis melancholy, truly, to forecast the fierce, unruly
      Supersurging of their blushes, like the flushes upon high
      When Aurora Borealis lights her circumpolar palace
      And in customary manner sets her banner in the sky.
       
      "Each will think: 'This falsifier knows that I too am a liar.
      Curse him for a son of Satan, all unholily compound!
      Curse my leader for another! Curse that pelican, my mother!
      Would to God that I when little in my victual had been drowned!'"
       
      Then that venerable warner disappeared around a corner,
      And the season of unreason having also taken flight,
      All the cheeks of men were burning like the skies to crimson turning
      When Aurora Borealis fires her premises by night.

"At the Close of the Canvass" is reprinted from The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce Vol. IV: Shapes of Clay. Ambrose Bierce. New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1910.

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