Explore "Signs and Symbols" by Joyce Kilmer on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Those people whom an hostile fate has made both athletes and reformers have among their aversions one which they proclaim with an enthusiasm so intense as to be almost infectious. They dislike passionately the harmless, unnecessary sign board when it has been so placed as to become a feature of the rural landscape. Wooden cows silhouetted against the sunset only irritate them by their gentle celebrations of malted milk; the friendliest invitation to enjoy a cigarette, a corset or a digestive tablet fills them with anger if it comes from the face of a sea-shadowing cliff or from among the ancient hemlocks of a lofty mountain.
There is, of course, a modicum of reason in their attitude. It is wrong to paint the lily at all; it is doubly wrong to paint "Wear Rainproof Socks" across its virgin petals. It is wrong to mar beauty; that is an axiom of all aesthetics and of all ethics. It would be wrong, for example (although it would be highly amusing), to throw by means of a magic lantern great colored phrases against Niagara's sheet of foam; it would be wrong to carve (as many earnest readers of our magazines believe has been done), an insurance company's advertisement on the Rock of Gibraltar.