death is more than certain a hundred these sounds crowds odours it is in a hurry beyond that any this taxi smile or angle we do not sell and buy things so necessary as is death and unlike shirts neckties trousers we cannot wear it out no sir which is why granted who discovered America ether the movies may claim general importance to me to you nothing is what particularly matters hence in a little sunlight and less moonlight ourselves against the worms hate laugh shimmy The wit of drunkenness can easily be deciphered from this taxi-and-gin shorthand. Drunkenness is a mental dare-devilry; one of the few conditions, indeed, in which it is not disgraceful to be sentimental. The last thing drunkenness takes notice of is drink; and it is not sufficiently understood that a person in drunkenness is not drunk, but only very serious and therefore very hilarious or very gloomy. Mr. Cummings’ most serious poems, for example, are drunken poems; except his love poems--but these, perhaps, may also be classified as drunken poems. Therefore Mr. Cummings does not here say: “Death is more than certain, fellow drunkards. Out of every hundred people born a hundred die”, and proceed, as in _Down Among the Dead Men_: Then come, let us drink it while we have breath, For there’s no drinking after death! He clips his grammar, increases his speed and goes on with the argument, and does not stop until he has reached the conclusion that all there is left to do under the circumstances is to ‘hate, laugh, shimmy’--and speculate. For in drunkenness, it appears, one’s mind is not less but more clear than usual. It holds more, it thinks faster, it sees and understands everything; it is even like the taxi which, we gather, is assisting the poet in his poetic argument. So death triumphs, it is not left behind by the taxi (no sir!) together with the shops, the crowds and our rake’s fast thoughts. Nothing matters, therefore, (and here our rake turns, perhaps, to the other occupant of the taxi) except a little bragging sunshine to show the worms we don’t care and to hate, laugh, shimmy. And so Death does not triumph. Thus reads an old comic subject in nineteen twenty-six. The haughty intellectual slant of the modernist poet involves him in a bright game of spite against the middle-classes, which are responsible for the front of solemn good-breeding and politeness that poetry acquired in the last century. He combines upper-class impeccability and lower-class rough-neckedness into a disdainful modernist recklessness on the road. The stalest joke of comic song (but not of poetry) is the mother-in-law. Miss Sitwell’s _Fantasia for Mouth Organ_ dashingly takes the mother-in-law joke and sends it round the world to India, the North Pole and South Pole, the land of the red-skins, the land of the humming birds and the equatorial isles where the savages sank upon one knee--