Explore "My Literary Friend" by Henry Lawson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Once I wrote a little poem which I thought was very fine, / And I showed the printer's copy to a critic friend of mine, / First he praised the thing a little, then he found a little fault; / ‘The ideas are good,' he muttered, ‘but the rhythm seems to halt.'
So I straighten'd up the rhythm where he marked it with his pen, / And I copied it and showed it to my clever friend again. / ‘You've improved the metre greatly, but the rhymes are bad,' he said, / As he read it slowly, scratching surplus wisdom from his head.