The Social Plan
I know a very tiresome Man
Who keeps on saying, "Social Plan."
At every Dinner, every Talk
Where Men foregather, eat or walk,
No matter where, -- this Awful Man
Brings on his goddam Social Plan.
The Fall in Wheat, the Rise in Bread,
The social Breakers dead ahead,
The Economic Paradox
That drives the Nation on the rocks,
The Wheels that false Abundance clogs --
And frightens us from raising Hogs, --
This dreary field, the Gloomy Man
Surveys and hiccoughs, Social Plan.
Till simpler Men begin to find
His croaking aggravates their mind,
And makes them anxious to avoid
All mention of the Unemployed,
And leads them even to abhor
The People called Deserving Poor.
For me, my sympathies now pass
To the poor Plutocratic Class.
The Crowd that now appeals to me
Is what he calls the Bourgeoisie.
So I have got a Social Plan
To take him by the Neck,
And lock him in a Luggage van
And tie on it a check,
Marked MOSCOW VIA TURKESTAN,
Now, how's that for a Social Plan?
Commentary
A brief return to the Canadian theme…
(First published 1936)
In response to Lampman’s “To a Millionaire”, I received an interesting set of comments from Matthew Chanoff, in which he argued that the sentiments expressed therein were naive and dated by today’s standards (true enough), and that that reflected badly on the poem. I personally take the opposite standpoint - that the poem deserves to be judged by the standards of its own time, and that its merits lie in the writing, that is, in how effectively it cast those admittedly dated socioeconomic concerns into verse. (This is something I have alluded to before, in connection with Kipling’s poetry).
Still, that got me thinking about the other point of view, and about extremists of all stripes, and finally about Leacock (Canada’s finest humorist, IMO - I’m currently rereading his ‘Literary Lapses’ with much enjoyment). ‘Social Plan’ is far lighter in tone than ‘Millionaire’, and, inevitably, that lightness means that it has aged far better. Leacock’s reference to the ‘Gloomy Man’ is particularly apposite - the reader is at once reminded of a host of caricatures and sketches involving just such a figure; the poem need go into no further detail. And after all, social setups come and go, but painful people will always be with us <g>.
Constructionwise, the poem is fairly straightforward - it carries itself forward in a smoothly uninterrupted series of rhyming couplets, all the way until the last verse, where a variation of both the rhyme scheme and the metre picks up the pace in tandem with the narrator’s shifting into a more vehement tone. Nice.
Biography
Stephen Leacock was a shaggy, handsome, colorful, Canadian who proved to his countrymen that humour was almost respectable and certainly profitable, and delighted the world with his wit from the end of the Edwardian era until the middle of World War II.
He succeeded Mark Twain in 1910 as the foremost literary Stephen Leacock lived in and is identified with two very dissimilar Canadian milieus; one a small Ontario town (Orillia), the other a cosmopolitan Quebec metropolis (Montreal). As a fluently multi-lingual academic with a brilliant mind and a great flair for teaching the essence of things, he wintered and worked in Montreal for four decades; for twenty-eight years as chairman of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University.
During summers in Orillia, Leacock always retired early and rose at dawn to write for several hours in a study above the boathouse. Leaving most of the day free for sailing and fishing and supervising his big garden and small farm. He wrote about both places. Indeed there was rarely a day or a dawn when he did not write. His thirty-five volumes of humour followed one another at an average rate of one a year. He also wrote twenty-seven other books of history, biography, criticism, economics and Political science humorist in North America.
– http://www.transdata.ca/~leacock/bio.html
Links
Lampman’s “To a Millionaire”: poem #784
The rest of the Canadian theme was summarised in poem #786
The Stephen Leacock museum: http://www.transdata.ca/~leacock/
The National Library of Canada site on Leacock:
[broken link] http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/leacock/index-e.html
— Martin