16 July 2011

The Calf-Path (Sam Walter Foss)

I.
One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;

II.
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day,
By a lone dog that passed that way.
And then a wise bell-wether sheep,
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep;
And drew the flock behind him too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade.
Through those old woods a path was made.

III.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about;
And uttered words of righteous wrath,
Because 'twas such a crooked path.
But still they followed - do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf.
And through this winding wood-way stalked,
Because he wobbled when he walked.

IV.
This forest path became a lane,
that bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load,
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half,
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

V.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare;
And soon the central street was this,
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half,
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

VI.
Each day a hundred thousand rout,
Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o'er his crooked journey went,
The traffic of a continent.
A Hundred thousand men were led,
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent,
To well established precedent.

VII.
A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind,
Along the calf-paths of the mind;
And work away from sun to sun,
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.
But how the wise old wood gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah! many things this tale might teach -
But I am not ordained to preach.

41 comments:

erp said...

Love it.

Harry Eagar said...

The most anti-conservative poem I have ever read. Very surprised to see it here, even more surprised that erp loves it.

erp said...

Harry, what about this poem could possibly make you think it's anti-conservative when it's so gloriously and unabashedly conservative.

The path's tortuous twists and turns have been conserved through the centuries just because it's always been that way.

Isn't that what you libs think conservatives wrong-headedly want to do in the face of the better way of doing stuff for the greater good that libs are constantly devising regulations and rules about?

Harry Eagar said...

Well, yes, exactly. Liberals (or modernists) see conservatives/reactionaries as doing things wrong for the sole reason that they have always been done wrong.

I don't think the poet is endorsing the idea of using the calf-path unreconstructed. Just the reverse.

erp said...

Harry, you're right about the author's intent which is even clearer if you read his other works, but that doesn't mean I need to ignore what I like about the poem part of which is that lefties are so predictable.

BTW my statement about always doing things the same way they've always been done is facetious.

Hey Skipper said...

Speaking as one not inclined to poetry, this is brilliant.

Harry:

This can't possibly be merely anti-conservative, because it applies just as much to the thoughtless -- and frequently far more damaging -- pieties of the left.

Harry Eagar said...

It isn't about piety but I think the line about wasted lives reveals Foss's opinions about following well-worn paths because of their well-wornness.

I don't know what he thinks about, for example, queer theory.

Hey Skipper said...

Having thought about this poem a little more, I don't see how it is either conservative or anti-conservative.

It is about doing or thinking things the way you have always done or thought them, without thinking about why you do or think them.

There is a knock on conservatives there, more about the straw man than the reality. To be a Conservative requires assuming a priori that there are reasons the way things are the way they are, some or many of which are either not apparent, or unknowable; therefore, sudden social change is very likely to have serious unintended consequences.

Progressives have a much simpler set of unexamined assumptions: they know everything, consequently everything they think is right always.

(Krugman admitted as much in a column not too long ago.)

Peter said...

I think Harry assumes the author would favour taxing the rich to fund the cutting of new paths based on government scientific studies proving they would be more rational and efficient.

Harry Eagar said...

Or user fees.

We already know what kind of roads you get without government and taxes.

No roads.

Susan's Husband said...

Wrong, again.

Harry Eagar said...

You'd be hard put to find one of those today. The history of turnpikes is really quite interesting, but the key words in the abstract are 'seldom paid dividends.'

It was a failed model of delivering a service, which may be why when railroads came along, nobody thought to replicate it there.

Anyhow, human history is long and expansive, and finding a few private roads in a backward corner of the world for about three decades hardly contradicts the basic statement.

Susan's Husband said...

So you're saying that railroads were all public sector and no one paid a toll (fare) to use them? That's not quite the history I remember.

erp said...

Public railroads are a new fangled idea that can’t possibly become viable. All the billions it’ll take to plan, build and maintain them will be thrown down the rat hole of unionism and leftwing cronyism.

Short History Lesson: Early railroads were built with private money and were profitable because they were faster and more convenient and more comfortable than what they replaced -- the horse and wagon.

They, in turn, were replaced in large part because service deteriorated with the arrival of subsidies and unions while fare increased.

Enter DDE and the interstate highways which combined with the end of the war and a general optimistic and upbeat citizenry elevated the private internal combustion machine to primacy for personal use.

Railroads coulda been contenders for freight movement except for the feds and the unions.

This deadly combination has been working its magic on our economy and continues to do so as we speak. s/off

Peter said...

erp/Harry/SH

Excellent points, but poets are weeping.

Harry Eagar said...

Erp, you need to read the history of railroading.

They were not, initially, cheaper than mules. And they were very far from private. They got the biggest subsidies in history -- any history. And they were not profitable even so. (Kinda like airlines that way.)

They were not ruined by unions but by mismanagement, which is proven by the fact that today many of them, though unionized, are among the most profitable transportation businesses around.

The biggest difficulty in profitability for US railroads, aside from the fact that most of them were promoted by crooks, was that there were too many of them for the traffic, so none could be profitable except by using underhanded methods like drawbacks.

Also, before regulation, they were about a safe as the plague.

* * *

I thought poets got paid to weep, so they should be happy.

erp said...

Harry, I said nothing about railroads being cheaper than mules and your opinion that it was management, not the unions, which killed the railroads is depressingly similar to your side's argument about all the industries killed or sent packing by them.

I don't buy it and BTW is there now or has there ever been a single capitalist who wasn't greedy, corrupt ...

Bret said...

I'll have to agree with Harry that the story of the railroads was certainly NOT a story of free markets.

erp said...

Not that latter-day story when the guvmint got involved to be sure

erp said...

Not that latter-day story when the guvmint got involved to be sure

Bret said...

In the beginning, the "guvmint" gave vast tracts of land to the railroad companies as an incentive to build the railroad.

erp said...

They also gave land grants to thousands of ordinary settlers to open up the west, but then they left everyone to their own devices and didn't dictate their lives forever after.

Harry Eagar said...

Half the land on either side of the tracks for 30 miles in both directions, erp.

There have certainly been capitalists who were not corrupt, but probably not in the American railroad business.

Susan's Husband said...

As I recall, the Great Northern didn't get subsidies, and therefore was the most successful.

Note carefully the contrast here - Eagar claims that the private sector learned from the earlier failure of toll roads, yet he himself (and those of his political tribe) learned nothing from the railroad failure. I suggest it's because the creators of the failed subsidies were never held accountable for the subsequent failure.

It might be that Eagar thinks he's learned on thing from all of this - since almost all capitalists are corrupt, the only solution is to get rid of them. Yet he claims he's not a Communist.

Bret said...

My belief is that almost all people are greedy, power-hungry, and easily corruptible (other than Harry, of course :-), and that fact makes government, which ends up not really being accountable to anyone, much worse than the private sector, which has to answer to consumers, has to compete, and may also have to answer to government.

Harry Eagar said...

'I suggest it's because the creators of the failed subsidies were never held accountable for the subsequent failure.'

Oh, I think the states that had to go bankrupt because of the failed railroad bonds sort of felt they were being held accountable, but since the discussion, such as it is, has been virtually fact-free, keep on going.

It is kind of amazing that railroads, which, after all, have been sort of important in American political and business history, are practically a memory hole for today's partisans.

The economic history of railroading is quite interesting. Interesting enough to me, anyhow, to have spent some time learning about it. YMMV

Susan's Husband said...

Speaking of fact free, perhaps you could give us an example of a state that went bankrupt. As far as I know, that has never occurred.

Harry Eagar said...

'As I recall, the Great Northern didn't get subsidies, and therefore was the most successful.'

Well, as I recall, the Great Northern and the UP illegally colluded to restrain trade and that was how they made profits.

(If I were trying to demonstrate the probity of American railroad men, I don't think I would start with the Northern Securities scandal.)

Susan's Husband said...

Speaking of fact free, perhaps you could give us an example of a state that went bankrupt. As far as I know, that has never occurred.

Harry Eagar said...

From a History News Network article by a Professor Hummel:

"The political consequences are the trickiest to analyze. A government default is certainly a balanced-budget amendment with real teeth. Moreover, government defaults in the past, when not obviated by bailouts from other governments, seem to have had positive political consequences. Compare the widespread defaults of American state governments in the 1830s, with their cascading benefits--reluctance of states to set up government-owned railroads the way they had government-owned canals, balanced-budget constitutional amendments at the state level which even today impose lingering constraints, a general state retrenchment in a period of increasing laissez faire, among others--with the baleful consequences of the failure to repudiate the Revolutionary War debt, the most notorious of which was replacement of the Articles of the Confederation with the U.S. Constitution. During the late 1830s, President Martin Van Buren blocked any national bailout of the states, and yet the world did not end, and indeed the U.S. continued on the path of sustained growth that it had only recently started down. Unfortunately nowadays, with the U.S. and assorted international agencies stepping in to stave off sovereign defaults, we don't have good recent comparisons."

You will note his reference to widespread state defaults, and his somewhat misleading conclusion that this led to a reluctance to build public railroads. And his negative view of the Constitution and Hamiltonianism.

The state bankruptcies of the '30s were not monocausal, but sponsoring private railroads through public bonds was a big part of it.

Professor Hummel seems to be a default fan, doesn't he?

As I've said before, knowing economic history is a curse, but don't worry. It's not contagious.

erp said...

Harry, public bonds? Is that what you mean by government financing? Now more than ever, defining the terms is a must.

Susan's Husband said...

I'm still waiting for an actual, specific example. I have found that if you simply disbelieve general statements like "widespread defaults" that are not sufficient widespread that any actual examples can be named, you'll be right 98+% of the time.

I would also say that if your best, primary reference is an article on History News Network, you're not building credibility.

erp said...

Professor Hummel.

Sorry I couldn't help myself. ;-{

Harry Eagar said...

Look to the east. Indiana was one. Mississippi was another. There were a number of others.

I could, I suppose, go into the attic and dig out my economic history books from 35 years ago, but I don't think I'll bother.

Yes, erp. Faith and credit bonds, to back construction of railroads by private entrepreneurs, that either were not built, fell apart as soon as they were built or failed to earn a revenue.

I have to say that skepticism about such a well-known (to all economically literate people) episode in American political history verges on what the RCs call invincible ignorance.

Susan's Husband said...

Although not always a reliable source, Wikipedia says "The state narrowly avoided bankruptcy by negotiating the liquidation of the public works, transferring them to the state's creditors in exchange for a 50% reduction in the state's debt.". No actual bankruptcy. It also states the cause was excessive borrowing, not simply railroads. I would also note this from your own cite: "-reluctance of states to set up government-owned railroads the way they had government-owned canals". That strongly implies the bankruptcies preceded railroads, which makes your statement "the states that had to go bankrupt because of the failed railroad bonds" dubious.

The equivalent history for Mississippi has no mention at all.

I have spent some time searching on this topic in general and have yet to find any corroboration. I suppose it's possible that there were state bankruptcies early in American history and that information is not on the Internet and all the people I have read claiming "no state has gone bankrupt" were all wrong. However, since your claim is at odds with your own cite, I suspect it's more likely that (like Indiana) it was near bankruptcies and your cite was being figurative rather than literal. I remember trying to chase down other similar claims of yours that turned out to be non-factual. So I think by "invincible ignorance" you mean "doesn't agree in toto with my specific idiosyncratic interpretation of history".

Harry Eagar said...

Professor Hummel's post is, shall we say, idiosyncratic, as I hinted at. He seems to lump all canals, successful and unsuccessful, into the unsuccessful category, for example. He sounds like an extreme libertarian.

However, he was the first I found (it took me less than a minute) to refer, as a matter of course, to numerous state defaults.

There are lots of things that have yet to make it onto the internet.

Peter said...

I think this thread proves this is a very conservative poem.

Joe Shropshire said...

Any poem with a primeval calf in it is pretty much a conservative poem, regardless of what its own author or anybody else might think.

Peter said...

Any poem with a primeval calf in it is pretty much a conservative poem

That's true. I can always tell a liberal poem by the modern rationalist calf spouting off about social justice and human rights.

Joe Shropshire said...

The poem's insufferable. The primeval calf is charming, as primeval calves are wont to be. The calf wins.

Peter said...

Actually, Joe, I loved the poem. The calf, I've seen better.