This, roughly, is the principle that guides my needle.
To prove you are invincible it hurts a little;
it plucks from your pale cheeks the blooming roses
and checks their petals for tuberculosis!»
As for 1907, it's neither here
nor there. But Auden is born this year!
This birth is the greatest of all prologues!
Still, Pavlov gets interested in dogs.
Next door Mendeleev, his bearded neighbor
who gave the universe the table
of its elements, slips into a coma.
The Cubists' first show, while Oklahoma
becomes the Union's 46th
state. Elsewhere New Zealand seeks
to fly the Union Jack. Lumiere
develops the colored pictures ere
anyone else (we all owe it to him!)
The Roman Pope takes a rather dim
view of modernism: jealous Iago!
Having squashed (4-0) Detroit, Chicago
forever thirsting for
Gloria Mundi
wins the World Series. In Swinemunde
Nicholas the lInd meets the German Kaiser
for a cup of tea. That, again, is neither
here nor there, like Kalamazoo.
And Carl Hagenbeck opens his cageless zoo
where walruses swim, lions pace, birds fly
proving: animals also can live a lie.
The man of the year, you won't believe,
is Joseph Stalin, then just a thief.
He is young; he is twenty-eight;
but History's there, and he cannot wait.
(Joseph Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin)
"My childhood was rotten, I lived in mud.
I hold up banks 'cause I miss my dad.
So to help the party, for all my troubles
one day I took four hundred grand in rubles.
