Rock Me to Sleep
poem was perfected. It seems that even after all the work done on it during the long sea voyage from New York to San Francisco, it still did not measure up to his high ideal of what a poem ought to be.
Ball’s partisans hailed this letter with a great blare of trumpets as absolutely conclusive; but there is only one inference to be drawn from it (aside from the unfair one that it is a fabrication), and that is that Ball, as was his custom, was ostentatiously posing as a poet and tinkering at some doggerel during the voyage in order to impress his shipmates, and that Mr. Wright’s imagination, after a lapse of more than ten years, did the rest.
That it was doggerel there can be no question, if one is to judge by the other specimens of Ball’s versification included in the book, but before going into that, Mr. Morse’s final and conclusive proof must be examined. “This,” says he, “is to be found in the poem itself,” the fifteen stanzas of which, he points out, “belong to the same one exquisite mosaic.”
One of the commonest devices of the literary thief is to write some additional stanzas to the poem he has stolen in order to prove that he wrote all of them. It is also one of the most perilous, for seldom indeed can the pretender duplicate the flavor of the original. In Mr. Ball’s case it is fatal. Mrs. Akers’s “Rock Me
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