Think of it as a last-gasp followon to the poems about poets theme <g>.

Bierce has written better poems, but I really couldn’t resist this one for the sheer unexpected beauty (or do I mean beautiful unexpectedness?) of the pun at the end.

Of course, I strongly disagree with his assertion that Browning is obscure or lacking in sense :)

Bierce, incidentally, was not primarily a poet, but a wit, satirist and marvellous short story writer. His best known works include The Devil’s Dictionary, and the haunting short, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” both highly recommended.

Blacking, incidentally, was the precursor of shoe polish.

— Martin

Biography

Bierce, Ambrose

in full Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

 b. June 24, 1842, Meigs county, Ohio, U.S.
 d. 1914, Mexico?

American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror. His life ended in an unsolved mystery.

Reared in Kosciusko county, Ind., Bierce became a printer’s devil (apprentice) on a Warsaw, Ind., paper after about a year in high school. In 1861 he enlisted in the 9th Indiana Volunteers and fought in a number of American Civil War battles, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. After being seriously wounded in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, he served until January 1865, and he received a merit promotion to major in 1867.

Resettling in San Francisco, which was experiencing an artistic renaissance, he began contributing to periodicals, particularly the News Letter, of which he became editor in 1868. Bierce was soon the literary arbiter of the West Coast.

[..]

In 1877 he became associate editor of the San Francisco Argonaut but left it in 1879-80 for an unsuccessful try at placer mining in Rockerville in the Dakota Territory. Thereafter he was editor of the San Francisco Wasp for five years. In 1887 he joined the staff of William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, for which he wrote the “Prattler” column. In 1896 Bierce moved to Washington, D.C., where he continued newspaper and magazine writing. In 1913, tired of American life, he went to Mexico, then in the middle of a revolution led by Pancho Villa. His end is a mystery, but a reasonable conjecture is that he was killed in the siege of Ojinaga in January 1914.

Bierce separated from his wife, lost his two sons, and broke many friendships. As a newspaper columnist, he specialized in critical attacks on amateur poets, clergymen, bores, dishonest politicians, money grabbers, pretenders, and frauds of all sorts. His principal books are In the Midst of Life (1892), which included some of his finest stories, such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “A Horseman in the Sky,” “The Eyes of the Panther,” and “The Boarded Window”; and Can Such Things Be? (1893), which included “The Damned Thing” and “Moxon’s Master.” Bierce’s The Devil’ Dictionary (originally published in 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book) is a volume of ironic, even bitter, definitions that has often been reprinted. His Collected Works was published in 12 volumes, 1909-12. The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, edited by E.J. Hopkins, appeared in 1967.

– EB