That Jack Rabbit Sonnet

THE editor of the Contributors’ Club has disappeared from view, carrying with him into retirement a green bag, full of Jack Rabbit sestets, a Rhyming Dictionary, and a masterly German treatise upon the Petrarchan sonnet. When he emerges, the friendly poets who have made haste to complete the sheep herder’s sonnet, printed in the July Atlantic, may be confident that he will have canvassed their merits with a judicious eye. While no one has a right to anticipate his decision, we fail to see how he can refuse to award the palm for speed in composition to that Omaha rhymer whose sestet reached the Atlantic in less than three days after the publication of the magazine. And there is much to be said for the effort of a Pennsylvania Quaker, aged sixty-eight, whose sestet begins with the sprightly though most un-Quakerlike ejaculation,

But the editor of the Club may be trusted to make his own report in a future number.