Ah, Knickebocker
What a fun name to say!
Doesn't matter if it's
made up,
Have you heard the
stories he relayed?
Poor Rip Van Winkle,
His kindness and
laziness unmatched
Found a party up in the
mountains
And dozed away twenty
years past!
(Could he possibly be
The Sleeper Whitman
aspired to be?)
Then the terrifying,
hauntingly story
Of the Legend of Sleepy
Hollow
A horseman with no
head,
Lopping of others
instead!
(Could it be, as a
curse,
He had succumbed to the
Imp of Perverse?)
You cannot simply
escape from the Horseman,
Crossing a certain
bridge is just a diversion.
This is why this writer
Is the password to my
mind.
The inspiration to the
creation
Of stories I shall
unravel in time.
Explanation: The poem is based on the stories written by Diedrich Knickebocker (a
persona of the satirist Washington Irving). The first story, Rip Van Winkle,
could be compared to Whitman, not just with "The Sleepers" but also
"Song of Myself" (as the character and poetic subject both
"loafe"). "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "The Imp
of the Perverse" both have characters that have the impulse to kill and
the supernatural element.
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