Quaint and Curious - Parodies and Pastiches of Poe's The Raven

A Terrible Fate

1881

Anon

The Topeka Weekly Times, 6 July 1881, p. 4

This parody is prefaced as follows:

Once upon a time a young man was requested by an editor to write something. He went home and thought and thought. First his ideas ran in prose, but as the strain became more heavy, and his mind began to wander, his brain became delirious, and soon blank verse was surging through his existence with a velocity that would have completed Dante’s Inferno in a few hours; but the strain was too much, and soon he ran into metre. Poetry flowed from his thoughts with the speed of the lightning’s flash. So fast and furious did his ideas come and go, that only two small verses were preserved to the world by his pencil. He continued to run, and at last accounts was trying to engage passage in the “P. Q.” for the Insane retreat two miles up the river.

MORAL: Never ask another young man to write anything, when that young man is hot—too hot to think:

Once upon a midday, hot, and dreary,

While I pondered, weak, and weary;

Pondered for some idea, rich and racy,

That would make the paper spicy.

Suddenly there came a tapping

As of some one gently rapping—

Rapping on my office door—

’Tis some subscriber, come to pay me;

Or some friend, I muttered low,

Coming for a puff,

Nothing more!

Thinking this, I upstarted,

Feeling altogether better hearted,

And without slightest hesitation,

With no fear or trepidation,

I opened wide the office door.

There, I had seen him of’t before;

Bill in hand, as if rooted to the floor.

Only this and nothing more.

[With the above, we found a note in the well known hand writing of our venerable friend, which said: “Please tell my friends I will meet them on the other shore—at Poppendicks.”—Ed. Times.]

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