The World Awheel
Contents
- S. Conant Foster's opening poem invokes Pegasus and a 'singing fountain' to launch the volume, likening the making of verse to the rhythmic turning of a bicycle's treadle.
- Christopher Wordsworth's poem describes Moscow's glittering spires, steel-clad bastions and gold-bespangled halls standing silent under a night sky, its stillness broken only by a passing choir.
- S. Conant Foster looks out on a snow-covered winter landscape and recalls summer cycling excursions — dawn rides, club drills and races — while awaiting the return of the season.
- Charles G. D. Roberts's playful poem likens his beloved Phillida, glimpsed cycling through town in her 'abbreviated gown,' to an earthly angel too good for heaven and too good for him.
- Ernest De Lancey Pierson's ballade, refrained 'Then ho for a spin on the flying wheel!,' moves through blooming hedgerows, idle summer ease and a Rosalind glimpsed at sunset, closing with a formal envoy.
- A short reprinted excerpt of Oliver Goldsmith's verse praising France as a 'gay, sprightly land of mirth and social ease.'
- Robert Barr's short story: Jack Hinkston, long spurned by Cissie, finds her stranded on a country lane with a punctured bicycle tire, self-conscious in her new knickerbocker costume; his teasing and her flustered defense of the outfit lead the estranged pair toward reconciliation.
- S. Conant Foster's sonnet addresses his bicycle as a swift, silent steel steed carrying him through moonlit, dew-bright fields, and wonders whether the machine shares his own sense of released bondage.
- Charles G. D. Roberts's poem has a poet fall asleep beside his bicycle in the woods and be visited by the Muse, who mocks the wheel as a poor modern substitute for Pegasus before he wakes and rushes off to woo his latest love.
- A reprinted Robert Burns love song praising a faithful Highland lassie above titled dames and foreign palaces.
- S. Conant Foster's drinking-song toast urges away dull care as riders uncork wine and mount their wheels at the promise of dawn.
- Polly King recalls gliding hand in hand along flowering hedgerows with a lost love, now remembered only when the same hedgerows turn brown and bare.
- A reprinted excerpt of Oliver Goldsmith's verse describing the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea with dikes, canals and windmill-dotted polders.
- Robert Clarkson Tongue's mock-mythological ode credits the bicycle's invention to ancient gods and heroes — Hermes, Icarus, Phaeton, the Caliph's flying carpet — and declares the modern wheel their superior.
- A reprinted Lord Houghton verse on youthful travelers wandering the Swiss mountains, where 'no path' is 'without its waterfall.'
- Robert Barr's comic story: two rival American cycling clubs, the Fly Wheelers ('High Flyers') and the Bouncing Bikers, cross paths in Lucerne, and the Bouncers trick two High Flyers into dressing as brigands to cross the Brunig Pass, where a staged 'kidnapping' by the Interlaken Bicycle Club turns into a friendly dinner at Werren's Bear Hotel on Lake Brienz.
- A reprinted, translated Heinrich Heine poem in which the poet, boating down the Rhine, likens the river's alluring but treacherous current to his own beloved.
- Abigail Quay's poem has Cupid invite a 'fair maid' to ride out on a bicycle amid blooming meadows, birdsong, sea-breeze and summer perfume.
- John Bruce Norton's sonnet describes standing amid the excavated forum, baths and barracks of Pompeii, half-expecting its vanished citizens to come swarming back from holiday.
- Alberto A. Bennett's poem follows a favorite cycling route past briers and a ravine bridge, up a hated hill, to an ivy-crowned gate where a loved one waits.
- A reprinted Lord Houghton verse on beholding the Egyptian pyramids at the desert's edge, works that 'rival nature' and endure like a rocky coast against the waves.
- A reprinted Nicholas Michell verse on the sun setting over the Nile valley and the crumbling, storied ruins of the Pharaohs' Egypt.
- Madeline S. Bridges's short poem contrasts the maiden's old-fashioned spinning wheel by the fireside with the modern bicycle wheel that now carries her 'spinning round the world.'
- Eben E. Rexford's poem celebrates an early-morning bicycle ride through dew-wet grass, wildflower-scented hedgerows and windy hilltops, the rider feeling 'kin to the wind' and thrilled with the bliss of motion.
- Harriet Monroe's short poem compares cyclists riding out at dawn and gliding home under a starlit sky to gray moths and homeward will-o'-the-wisps.
- Robert Barr's comic story recounts the author's dread of punctures, a botched roadside repair on a lonely hill, and his mistakenly riding off on a stranger's bicycle before returning it and being shown, with good grace, how to properly mend a tire.