archy and mehitabel

My friend Karen Trollope Kumar gave me a copy of selected essays by E B White, and I've been rereading them with great pleasure.  Some appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s when I subscribed to this magazine in the latter part of its greatest years as the repository for the best writing and best cartoons in America, perhaps in the world at that time.  I've been reading them slowly, sipping them as I'd sip a single malt whisky.  A  few days ago I came to E B White's eulogy for Don Marquis, who was a reporter for the New York Sun, a playwright, and the creator of archy and mehitabel. archy was a cockroach who contained the transmigrated soul of a verse libre poet.  archy typed his bad poetry, which contained much simple homespun philosophy, in the newspaper's office after everyone had left for the day. He typed painstakingly and painfully (for him) on a huge Office Underwood typewriter by diving head-first on to the keyboard, one letter at a time. He wasn't able to operate the shift key, so everything is typed lower case; how he operated the carriage to shift the paper down one line at a time is never explained.  mehitabel is a disreputable alley cat of questionable lineage and parentage, with the transmigrated soul of Cleopatra and sundry other notorious girls with equivocal moral and ethical standards. Naturally, after reading E B White's eulogy of Don Marquis I had to go back to the complete archy and mehitabel poems, which amazingly still survive on the set of book shelves where I keep my most precious books. I quoted one of the shorter poems in my last post, and the temptation to post more is irresistible. 

Here is archy's first 'poem' in the sequence that ran for years:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a verse libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the underside now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have 
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont
she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay

most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job 
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

don't you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy

I'm tempted to add the next poem, about and partly by mehitabel, but it will keep for another time.