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Title: The Red, Red West
Author: Eugene Field [
More Titles by Field]
I'VE travelled in heaps of countries, and studied all kinds of art,
Till there isn't a critic or connoisseur who's properly deemed so smart;
And I'm free to say that the grand results of my explorations show
That somehow paint gets redder the farther out West I go.
I've sipped the voluptuous sherbet that the Orientals serve,
And I've felt the glow of red Bordeaux tingling each separate nerve;
I've sampled your classic Massic under an arbor green,
And I've reeked with song a whole night long over a brown poteen.
The stalwart brew of the land o' cakes, the schnapps of the frugal Dutch,
The much-praised wine of the distant Rhine, and the beer praised overmuch,
The ale of dear old London, and the port of Southern climes,--
All, ad infin., have I taken in a hundred thousand times.
Yet, as I afore-mentioned, these other charms are naught
Compared with the paramount gorgeousness with which the West is fraught;
For Art and Nature are just the same in the land where the porker grows,
And the paint keeps getting redder the farther out West one goes.
Our savants have never discovered the reason why this is so,
And ninety per cent of the laymen care less than the savants know;
It answers every purpose that this is manifest:
The paint keeps getting redder the farther you go out West.
Give me no home 'neath the pale pink dome of European skies,
No cot for me by the salmon sea that far to the southward lies;
But away out West I would build my nest on top of a carmine hill,
Where I can paint, without restraint, creation redder still!
[The end]
Eugene Field's poem: Red, Red West
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