Strawberry shrub, old-fashioned, quaint as quinces,
Hard to find in a world where neon and noise
Have flattened the ends of the three more subtle senses
And blare and magenta are all that a child enjoys.

More brown than red the bloom—it is a dense color,
Color of dried blood; color of the key of F.
Tie it in your handkerchief, Dorcas, take it to school
To smell. But no, as I said, it is browner than red; it is duller
Than history, tinnier than algebra; and you are color-deaf.

Purple, a little, the bloom; like musty chocolate;
Purpler than the purple avens of the wet fields;
But brown and red and hard and hiding its fragrance;
More like an herb it is: it is not exuberant.
You must bruise it a bit; it does not exude; it yields.

Clinker-built, the bloom, overlapped, its petals
Like clapboards; like a boat I had; like the feathers of a wing;
Not graceful, not at all Grecian, something from the provinces:
A chunky, ruddy, beautiful Boeotian thing.

Take it to school, knotted in your handkerchief, Dorcas,
Corner of your handkerchief, take it to school, and see
What your teacher says; show your pretty teacher the curious
Strawberry shrub you took to school for me.

I went to a modern doctor to learn what it was was wrong.
I'd lately been off my fodder, and life was no more a song.
He felt of my pulse as they all do, he gazed at my outstretched tongue;
He took off my coat and weskit and harked at each wheezing lung.
He fed me a small glass penstalk with figures upon the side,
And this was his final verdict when all of my marks he'd spied:

"Do you eat fried eggs? Then quit it.
You don't? Then hurry and eat 'em,
Along with some hay that was cut in May—
There are no other foods to beat 'em.
Do you walk? Then stop instanter—
For exercise will not do
For people with whom it doesn't agree—
And this is the rule for you:
Just quit whatever you do do
And begin whatever you don't;
For what you don't do may agree with you
As whatever you do do don't."

Yea, thus saith the modern doctor, "Tradition be double durned!
What the oldsters knew was nothing compared to the things we've learned.
There's nothing in this or that thing that's certain in every case
Any more than a single bonnet's becoming to every face.
It's all in the diagnosis that tells us the patient's fix—
The modern who knows his business is up to a host of tricks.

Do you eat roast pork? Then stop it.
You don't? Then get after it quickly.
For the long-eared ass gives the laugh to grass
And delights in the weed that's prickly.
Do you sleep with the windows open?
Then batten them good and tight
And swallow the same old fetid air
Through all of the snoozesome night.
Just quit whatever you do do
And do whatever you don't;
For what you don't do may agree with you
As whatever you do do don't.