Would I consort with anarchists,
And mix, and drink, and dine?
Oh, yes, I board an anarchist—
He is a chum of mine.
A ruthless enemy to law,
This boarder that I mention,
A friend to lawless unconstraint,
A foe to all convention.
And though I diligently try
To keep my home in trim,
I harbor this wild anarchist
And grow attached to him.
His incoherent creed by day
He blusters and he babbles;
By night he howls it in our ears,
Or garrulously gabbles.
The right to private ownership
He strenuously denies;
He rends and tears my property
Before my very eyes;
And in his fierce and lawless moods
He'll pound us and belay us;
Oh, he's confusion's champion,
A hierarch of Chaos!
There are no rights that he respects,
No sanctity reveres;
Regards not customs, creeds nor texts,
Experience nor years.
No laws nor constitutions bind
This anarchist of ours,
Nor popes, nor principalities,
Nor potencies, nor powers.
He is a hopeless radical,
A sworn iconoclast—
No plan or purpose for to-day,
No reverence for the past.
You ask me why I keep him, then;
Well, I can answer, may be
Because—because he calls me "Dad!"
And I—I call him "Baby."
—S. W. Foss in the Courier.
Troy Times. August 28, 1890: 6 col 1.
Fort Worth Daily Gazette. August 3, 1890: 4 col 6.
Victoria Daily Colonist. August 17, 1890: 3 col 3.
Switchmen's Journal 5(11). March, 1891. 742.
Union Pacific Employes' Magazine 6(3). April 1891. 89.
Foss, Sam Walter. Back Country Poems. Boston, MA: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1894. 76-77.
Samuel Walter Foss (1858-1911)
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