Book, The Ghost in the Underblows by Alfred Young Fisher

This is a Book. It was designed by Alvin Lustig. It is dated 1940 and we acquired it in 1993. Its medium is lithography in orange and black ink on off-white wove paper. It is a part of the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department.

This object was donated by Tamar Cohen. It is credited Gift of Tamar Cohen and Dave Slatoff.

Its dimensions are

H x W: 23.9 x 31.5 cm (9 7/16 x 12 3/8 in.)

It is inscribed

Printed in black ink: My memory/Is old and full of other store;/I cannot be/The prophet of what I do not see)./And then…and then…and then…/The same thing is that might have been/Had man not made destruction in his head/Nor lamented/An Eden lost or an Inferno seen./The stones pile up, twisted and high/Like questions in the sky,/Growing from this our place,/Stretching out to reach a final space,/To touch the inscrutable face,/Questing the answer for the what and why./X/But yesterday nearby a cave’s mouth in a hill/A wolf sat mournfully, howling in the sun./And when the stones had crumbled down/Five skeletons of kings walked out(with halters on their necks)/With light step, scarce touching the earth;/And there behind them trailed a bareribbed wolf;/Over the hill they passed and were as light as air./And nowadays one says they smile at stones/That the Lord casts from heaven./The kings of all the world who dwell in hills/Are hewers of wood and watercarriers/For all the world now in its pride;/But yet they bear it as all kings do bear/Necessity, smiling perhaps at pain./Sometimes I think the sun stays in the heaven for them/And that the tides of earth roll on, coming/And going for these same kings whose ribs/Show in the light like wattles of an Irish hut./Down in the brain the princely men,/Though first put down, are living skeletons/112.

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