The World Awheel

Edited by Volney Streamer189626 chapters13 images

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Contents

• Prelude (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Moscow (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• A Midwinter Reverie (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Phillida on Her Wheel (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Ballade of Bicycling (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• France (opens in a new tab)

  A short reprinted excerpt of Oliver Goldsmith's verse praising France as a 'gay, sprightly land of mirth and social ease.'
• Made for Two (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• To My Bicycle (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• The Muse and the Wheel (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Song, Highland Lassie, O! (opens in a new tab)

  A reprinted Robert Burns love song praising a faithful Highland lassie above titled dames and foreign palaces.
• Toasting Song (opens in a new tab)

  S. Conant Foster's drinking-song toast urges away dull care as riders uncork wine and mount their wheels at the promise of dawn.
• A Cycle Memory (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Holland (opens in a new tab)

  A reprinted excerpt of Oliver Goldsmith's verse describing the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea with dikes, canals and windmill-dotted polders.
• The Bicycle (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Switzerland (opens in a new tab)

  A reprinted Lord Houghton verse on youthful travelers wandering the Swiss mountains, where 'no path' is 'without its waterfall.'
• The Brigands of the Brunig (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• The Rhine (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Cupid's Whispering of the Delights Awheel (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Pompeii (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• My Wheel and I (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• The Pyramids (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• Egypt (opens in a new tab)

  A reprinted Nicholas Michell verse on the sun setting over the Nile valley and the crumbling, storied ruins of the Pharaohs' Egypt.
• Wheels and Wheels (opens in a new tab)

  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.'
• Awheel (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• The Bicyclers (opens in a new tab)

  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.
• A Puncture in the Tire (opens in a new tab)

  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.