Wheel Songs: Poems of Bicycling
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Citation
S. Conant Foster. Wheel Songs: Poems of Bicycling. 1884. cyclearchive.com, https://cyclearchive.com/books/wheel-songs-poems-of-bicycling-s-foster-1884/
Page numbers are pages of the PDF, which can differ from the numbers printed on the page.
Contents
- Pegasus stamps his silver hoofs and opens a “singing fountain” whose every rhyming drop wakes a song to the sport and whose rainbows take the form of a wheel. The poet calls the reader to mount and let the lay flow on to the treadle's timing.
- A blank-verse idyll in which Cyclist rides out of the heated city past brooks, clover beds and ivied nooks to a cliff above a storm-beaten shore and a sheltered fishing town of hollyhocks and china-asters. Asleep beside an embedded wreck he dreams of his own sultry counting-house drudgery, and wakes crying “God bless my wheel!” Illustrated by Chas. J. Howard; the poem runs on through the plates to physical page 22.
- Two stanzas of flirtation: riding past Pansy Villa the wheelman asks how he is to know whether pretty Polly Miller is at home, and begs her to hang a ribbon in the curtain as their secret signal that his wheel should be seen at her door.
- A long comic verse letter from Winona Bevan to her cousin Louise announcing her engagement to Harry, the bicyclist who leapt from his machine to stop her runaway pony Deuteronomy short of the broken drawbridge and was pinned under it for his pains. His first words on recovering were “Was the bicycle smashed?”; a postscript records that he has bought her a tandem “trike”, which she at first mistook for a cradle.
- A wheelmen's drinking song urging dull care away and the red grape of France uncorked, with libations poured until the ice of life is dead, morning steals on the glistening wheels and the order “Mount” is given. The last stanza fills a “treadle cup” to ourselves and our wheels.
- A pastor of Herter village, tormented by a clangour in his breast louder than his chapel bell, challenges the Devil to come out and do his worst, then flees on his wheel. He meets the Devil riding down from Mount Andrew, races him five miles back to the village, wins at the fourth stroke of midnight, and is woken by his wife, who complains he has kicked her almost out of bed and should ride more and study less.
- With the earth in Winter's snowy mantle and sleighs hiding the paths lately ridden, the poet warms himself on memory: trips a-wheel before daybreak, breakfasts of roadside berries, thirst quenched kneeling at a spring, the drill, the race and that memorable run. He bids the frosts spend themselves, since summer's ecstasies will come again.
- In short dactylic lines a rider paddles across an angry, freshet-swollen stream that has stopped train and team, shoulders his wheel up the far bank and rides on, coaxing the machine to confess why they hurry: a bride waits impatient at the altar, and St. Michael's is already tolling four.
- Every morning as he spins out for exercise the rider is given a glance by a poor girl in tidy calico carrying a penny-worth of milk and two-pence-worth of bread. He proposes, offering to fetch the milk himself and dress her in silk; the closing stanza has her riding at his side as his wife, the errand now doubled.
- An elegy for a club-mate, ridden to on a sunny morning that seemed dark, with flowers laid on the new-made grave until the scent of roses covers the mound. A prose note quotes Charles E. Pratt's “History of the Boston Club” on the death of member and young journalist Edward Hogan on 5 September 1880, and the club's silent ride two-by-two, crape under the silver star, to the Waltham cemetery.
- The first of the sonnets, addressed to Charles E. Pratt: the poet wishes for a more skilful harp to praise the man whose pen “has dropped such ornaments for wheeling men” and whose genial leadership has spread like a banyan tree through the whole wheeling fraternity.
- A sonnet to the machine itself, swifter than Atalanta, silent as the working of the mind, gliding from city walls to moonlit fields of scintillating dew. The poet wonders whether the noiseless thing of steel feels bondage as he does and takes the same relief in this green-pastured flight.
- A sonnet subtitled “By a Bicycler” that mock-hails the first of January, the great day for swearing off, when topers drop to lager and beardless youths demand a raise. The wheelman withholds his blessing from a month that steals his summer tan and blocks the boulevard with ice and snow, and asks it to keep its icy gifts until July.
- A long Yankee-dialect monologue delivered at farmer Plunkitt's well: Si tells how he bought a “bi.”, and how each attempt to ride it ended in disaster, pitched a fathom high into a hot-bed, shot down the back stairs and clean through a window, his wife Betz's knee driven into him, and finally through the pig-sty “inside, kerslam!” He gave up the wheel because Betz got “sot ag'in it”. Illustrated in silhouette by Henry Stull; runs to physical page 66.
- Subtitled “A Tale of the Central Park, after E. A. Poe”. A gaily bedight cycling knight passes the gate after dark in search of Eldorado, finds some “hunky ground”, and on asking a “peeler's shadow” for directions gets a duplex rap on the cap; the cop declines his tin and runs him in.
- A parody set to the air of “The Old Oaken Bucket”, cursing the six-dollar, double-decked bugle tooted by a raw amateur on the poet's block, it wrecks his rhyming and ties up his nerves. He suggests the League suppress it, or that Colonel Pope raise the tariff on its vile importation, and envies the men who threw the tea into the dock.
- A comic song with chorus about an over-equipped rider in corduroy, whistle, bugle, bicycle book, route map, lamp and multum-in-parvo, who shows off with his heels on the handles for the maids on the walk until his machine balks. He goes over the fork and scatters himself from East to West, leaving the coroner's jury to finish the tale.
- A cockney trainer talks to his mate Bob about the likely “younker” spinning round ahead of record: if he repeats it tomorrow they are winners of a hundred pound, so the performance must be kept shady and the boy's real time reported “a leetle be'ind the fence”.
- An eight-line exchange of horse-and-wheel puns. The horseman bridles up and whips out a bit-ter shaft, that anyone who tires his bones on a cycle is “cranky, weak, and daft”, and the man of steel answers that his sulky life is full of whoa while his own cranky one is of wheel.
- An Irish widow shopkeeper scolds her son Terrence, home late with a “boycycle” and his breeches torn and hands black, while she is left with the baby and the store. She orders his lantern hung over the door to light up the notice for Mrs. O'Flaherty's Grocery Store and forbids him to ride “thur divil's invention” any more.
- The hand-lettered divider, with a grinning face vignette, opening the book's closing section of six comic limericks on riders' mishaps, illustrated by C. W. Reed.
- First of the “Loose Spokes” limericks: an urchin of Lynn conceals a pin on a saddle and watches the poor rider's fright with a most diabolical grin.
- A “Loose Spokes” limerick on a rider of three hundred and forty pounds who soberly proposes to buy a “Pacer” or a light semi-racer, “Good gracious! he oughtn't to, ought he?”
- A “Loose Spokes” limerick in which a Central Park policeman excitedly orders the rider to stop; the rider “fee-bly” opposes the injunction, the cop dozes off, and he rides through the Park regardless.
- A “Loose Spokes” limerick about a thin youth who buys bicycle breeks of tight pattern, soon takes them off again and remarks with a cough that he will wait till he fattens.
- A “Loose Spokes” limerick: mounting his wheel at the scratch of a bicycle match, the racer has a dog catch the slack of his breeches, and he now goes about with a patch.
- The last of the “Loose Spokes” limericks and the final page of the book: a rider sets out for a peaceable roll, his wheel takes a piece of a hole, and a requiem mass is soon sung for the peace of his soul.