Explore "The Retrospective Bird" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
His caw is a cackle, his eye is dim, / And he mopes all day on the lowest limb; / Not a word says he, but he snaps his bill / And twitches his palsied head, as a quill, / The ultimate plume of his pride and hope, / Quits his now featherless nose-of-the-Pope, / Leaving that eminence brown and bare / Exposed to the Prince of the Power of the Air.
And he sits and he thinks: "I'm an old, old man, / Mateless and chickless, the last of my clan, / But I'd give the half of the days gone by / To perch once more on the branches high, / And hear my great-grand-daddy's comical croaks / In authorized versions of "Bulletin" jokes."