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Show 81, Jeffries, Islamorada [Section 2] "You say you don't like poetry? Over my dead body you don't like poetry! The poetry. . ."Mr. Clayton hesitated, "I'm trying to think of something," and began hurriedly, like a deejay anxious to fill dead air, "The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, and hide in cooling trees, a voice will run from hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper's--Okay?--The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, and seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills. "Now hear this--" and a wall map flew up "--you copy this and there'll be a quiz on it tomorrow. S'from a poem called Crime by Robert Penn Warren." And Mr. Clayton was almost shouting now, very much the same as a TV commercial is adjusted up to follow you out of the room like the Hound of Heaven: BY THE STEAMED LAGOON, NEAR THE CARNIVOROUS ORCHID, PIRATES HIDE TREASURE, AND MARK THE PLACE WITH A SKULL, THEN LOSE THE MAP, AND ROAR IN PUBS WITH A SKINFUL, IN DEVON OR BARBADOS: BUT REMEMBER WHAT THEY HID. Well blow me over if they're not copying it, the headman espied, and he hurried off down the hall to reach into the tape and hold the bell. |