When Bill was a lad he was terribly bad.
He worried his parents a lot;
He’d lie and he’d swear and pull little girls’ hair;
His boyhood was naught but a blot.
At play and in school he would fracture each rule—
In mischief from autumn to spring;
And the villagers knew when to manhood he grew
He would never amount to a thing.
When Jim was a child he was not very wild;
He was known as a good little boy;
He was honest and bright and the teacher’s delight—
To his mother and father a joy.
All the neighbors were sure that his virtue’d endure,
That his life would be free of a spot;
They were certain that Jim had a great head on him
And that Jim would amount to a lot.
And Jim grew to manhood and honor and fame
And bears a good name;
While Bill is shut up in a dark prison cell—
You never can tell.
_John G. Neihardt_
John Gneisenau Neihardt was born at Sharpsburg, Illinois, January 8,
1881. He completed a scientific course at Nebraska Normal College in
1897 and lived among the Omaha Indians for six years (1901-7),
studying their customs, characteristics and legends.
Although he had already published two books, _A Bundle of Myrrh_
(1908) was his first volume to attract notice. It was full of
spirit, enthusiasm and an insistent virility—qualities which were
extended (and overemphasized) in _Man-Song_ (1909). Neihardt found a
richer note and a new restraint in _The Stranger at the Gate_
(1911); the best of the lyrics from these three volumes appearing in
_The Quest_ (1916).
Neihardt meanwhile had been going deeper into folk-lore, the results
of which appeared in _The Song of Hugh Glass_ (1915) and _The Song
of Three Friends_ (1919). The latter, in 1920, divided the annual
prize offered by the Poetry Society, halving the honors with Gladys
Cromwell’s _Poems_. These two of Neihardt’s are detailed long poems,
part of a projected epic series celebrating the winning of the West
by the pioneers. What prevents both volumes from fulfilling the
breadth at which they aim is the disparity between the author’s
story and his style; essentially racy narratives are recited in an
archaic and incongruous speech. Yet, in spite of a false rhetoric
and a locution that considers prairies and trappers in terms of
“Ilion,” “Iseult,” “Clotho,” the “dim far shore of Styx,” Neihardt
has achieved his effects with no little skill. Dramatic, stern, and
conceived with a powerful dignity, his major works are American in
feeling if not in execution.