Damn all these lousy pamphleteers 87 Damn and blast, blast and damn 36 Damnation! has that flat-faced woman gone? 103 Damn Billy Smith, he’s pinched my girl 45 Damned if I care what these nincompoops say of me 156 Damned if that stud hasn’t come loose once more 43 Damned if we’ll sweat, you greasy sycophant 52 Damned in these mucky estuaries of hell 113 Damn her! Where did she get those saffron eyes 11 Damn him! 73 Damn him! What the 128 Damn it all, I’ve swabbed these beetle-squashers 59 Damn kindness! damn faith! damn humanity! 97 Damn my eyes, if yonder paling moonlight 77 Damn Nero for a mawkish hypocrite 80 Damnonian maidens, in your sluttish smocks 34 Damn silly? Yet if this damned silliness 62 Damn the Church and damn the State 39 Damn those little ears of yours, my darling 101 Damn you, Charles, you’ve spoilt it all 1 Damp as the Morgue on autumn afternoons 100 I suppose the mechanical school of poets are hardly to be found at all in modern bookshelves, and yet there was a time when Edgar Pirbright was enthusiastically reviewed, and you would see his book, “By Helico to Helicon,” lying on the tables of all his personal friends. He was obsessed with the idea that mechanical triumphs, being part of Man’s self-assertion on the planet, are infinitely better subjects to be celebrated by the poet’s typewriter than Nature, “that irrelevant mass of geological strata and atmospheric effects,” as he called it. He even went so far as to bring out an anthology from the older poets, in which he included a great deal of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold and other writers who had shown themselves hostile to the march of civilization; but he had, as he said, adapted them—which meant that he had altered them freely so as to suit his own doctrines. Some of it was ingenious, and even contained a good deal of original work: for instance, when you read the stanza: Our fathers watered with their tears The sea of time whereon we sail; They watered it for years and years, But found its tides of no avail; Still the same ocean round us raves, But we have utilized its waves!— when you read a stanza like that, you did not realize all at once that it was the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse which Pirbright was “utilizing” to celebrate the glories of the tide-trap. And there was a certain forcefulness about lines like: