University of Virginia Library

5.

In explicating this locus classicus of modern poetry, it is necessary to bear in mind certain facts about the manuscripts — or "menu-scraps", as Skilmer himself wryly called them. Always a victim of poverty, the poet used to quill his sublimest ditties on the backs of labels laboriously soaked off the bottles of whiskey on which he shrewdly spent what little means the world afforded him. Thousands of these labels have survived, mute testimony to the trembling fingers that treasured them — each bearing only a few words of that great cornucopia of song he willed posterity. (There are also three labels from spaghetti cans, and one from a small can of succotash.) A study of some hundreds of manuscripts shows that Skilmer first wrote "A tree . . . that Aztec summer!" — a reference to the year he spent in Central America with an anthropological expedition. An idyllic year, possibly the happiest of his life, when his natural warmth and high spirits, so often thwarted by dingy circumstance, overflowed with an almost boyish ebullience. Arriving in early May, he had been married there three times by late June — and each time happily. Hence the little idyll about the Aztec summer, found on the manuscript Old Overholt 202 and certain others. (The spaghetti labels have little authority.) But the definitive reading is to be found on Heaven Hill 714: not "Aztec" but "Mayan", a word which Skilmer pronounced with the long a of May.

"A tree . . . that Mayan summer!" — and there it is forever, the bright leaves bathed in a golden haze of old romance, lost histories. An idyll, yes — but before long Skilmer's domestic bliss was shattered. He was followed to Yucatan by Mrs. Chloe P. Robbins of Ashtabula, a steamfitter's widow. With her came her daughter, the 47-year-old Honesta Lou, whom Skilmer called his "buxom nymph o' siren voice" — she was six feet two, her flaring red hair vivid with purple highlights. It is this vision of somewhat menacing loveliness that is now evoked in lines that recall Coleridge's

With deft economy, Skilmer laments the timelessness of his plight by using the archaic "'Ware' for "Beware".