Edward Sapir is remembered today as a linguist and anthropologist, but in 1917 he published a slim book of poems with The Poet Lore Company of Boston, dedicated to his wife. Dreams and Gibes gathers satirical portraits, war poems, love lyrics, and meditations on nature and the soul into a single restless volume. Its tone shifts from acid comedy to tenderness to metaphysical complaint, often within a few pages.
“A fussing pedagogue, no doubt, has tried His hand,” I thought, “on some new labeling scheme.”
The Mislabeled Menagerie and Other Portraits
The book opens in comedy. In the title poem, a visit to a zoo becomes a lesson in human folly: the animals have been shuffled overnight and the labels not yet corrected, so a monkey sits in the bear’s den, a camel occupies the ostrich cage, the elephant is marked “ass,” and the lion has shrunk to a porcupine. The speaker carries the joke into the street, relabeling his acquaintances—the grocer as “statesman,” the mayor as “grocer,” the rag buyer as “Philanthropist”—and concludes that his friends are “mislabeled all.” The poem sets the book’s method: sharp-eyed observation turned into moral satire.
The portraits that follow sharpen the edge. “Monks in Ottawa” watches two fat monks plod through a modern street full of trolley-cars and movie posters, trailing the smell of the past, only to discover them munching peanuts. “The Man of Letters” builds pretty patterns from inherited trinkets, then steals a neighbor’s coat to hang them on, since the public praises the garment underneath; the speaker notes he gave a literary friend a thought, and the friend made a volume of it and now sits with Chesterton and Shaw. “The Professor” writes an eight-hundred-page tome understood by one spectacled privat-docent in Bonn and himself. “The Metaphysician” is a dog chasing its tail, and the “Epitaph of a Philosopher” imagines a thinker who, dead, constructs a new flawless system daily and has yet to find one that cannot be demonstrated perfectly.
Two poems treat religion with more ambivalence. “The Clergyman” shares a Pullman smoker with a shrewd, twinkling divine who laughs safely, laughs restrainedly when less safe, and smiles an angel’s smile when unsafe; the speaker parts from him as “a human chap” who leaves “religious dope” at home with men, then wonders whether he does the same with his church crowd. “The Learned Jew” draws a loving, ironic portrait of a scholar whose learning is a many-chambered treasure-house: he mumbles prayers while thinking of weekly gains, corrects misquoted scripture, and is happiest in the Talmud, splitting hairs among Babylonian tomes and frenzied disputants.
War, Women, and the Ways of Men
The war poems turn the satire against patriotism itself. Boys stone the piles beneath a house while the dwellers watch, laugh, and wager on their favorite thrower; when the house tips and spills its people into the water, the boys keep yelling and quarrel “bravely” on dry land. “Epitaph of a Soldier” says the speaker died for king, land, justice, and right—but most of all because a shell caught him “in the nick of time.” In “The Old Maid and the Private,” a wounded soldier on furlough is lionized until an old maid delivers venomous rhetoric against the Germans and demands no quarter; the private answers meekly that common German soldiers are “pretty decent chaps” who kill and die doing as told, and that women-folk have men “beat on spunk.”
Love and art get their own skeptical treatment. “Delilah” surrenders entirely to a woman more beautiful than dreams and truer than any maze of truth. “The Reporter Congratulates the Orator” deflates public speech: the reporter praises a speech that held the audience captive for an hour, then admits his summary column yields three poor lines. “The Painting” ends with the painter, asked what his perfect vision means, mumbling that his ears are not as long as the viewer’s. “The Dainty and the Hungry Man” stages a debate in which the Dainty Man offers sweet cakes, perfumes, and distilled Beauty, and the Hungry Man rejects it all for coarse bread, the salt tang of ocean, shrieks, and the motley street—life’s crassness is what alone matters.
“The Water Nymph” is a dialogue between lovers recalling how he first saw her swimming in a deep pool near Hunter’s Bend and took her for a nymph; she protests he had not noticed her before, and he insists he loved her first in early spring, before he learned her human form. “Curtains” compares a Chinese laundry to a stage: when the speaker enters, the merry gabbing stops and the men stand mum; when he leaves, the play resumes. The same law governs his balcony with Lucy—two means curtain up, three means curtain down.
Clouds, Discords, and the Soul’s Many Chambers
The book’s final movement turns inward. Lying on the grass, the speaker names the forms of heavy-sailing clouds and imagines the nodding fir tops as camel’s-hair brushes writing his dreams on the sky; straying to a salt lake, he watches gulls criss-cross like kites on lengthening strings, the kites his own thoughts and desires. He never reached the snow-clad mountain top, he says, yet would not change places with the reader. “Discords” begs a cheery friend for silence, since major and minor mingled torture the ear like a sawing nail. “Love” confesses that the chivalrous love he had read and dreamt of is far less than what “you” have taught him.
A run of nature poems follows—dirty spring thaw, an Easter day of sparrows and blazing light, a summer wood where a wasp turns half-dream into droning revery, a storm begged to crack the air, rain begged to drench the body, a drab-white moth clapped dead—”the bang of fate”—and asked whether it is anything to God. “Water” observes that Nature takes time and space for her say, while man is artist, putting his soul into a drop to make a tear.
The last poems are cries of resistance and self-scrutiny. “Helpless Revolt” refuses respect for what is and breaks rather than bend to the brutal fact. “Liberty” will not die to throttling collectivities and efficiency-mongering; banished, the speaker and Liberty will live on roots and melt snow for drink, leaving hogs to their troughs. “Loneliness” walks fretful streets like a sullen shadow; “Vexation” delights in giving pain. “The Soul” declares “I am many,” with chambers of state, stormy desires, angelic song, and dungeons whose keys are thrown away; the speaker flits like Ariel and laughs from another room. The book closes with “A Prayer for Preservation,” asking God to make the soul strong, light, unafraid, and proud—despising itself and scorning the bribes of those who call themselves priests—lest it perish in cuddling warmth.
The Satirist as Lyric Poet
Dreams and Gibes holds two temperaments in one volume: the epigrammatist who sees through clergymen, professors, and patriots, and the lyric poet who wants nothing more than to lie on the grass and bend the firs to his will. The title announces the split. What unites the halves is a suspicion of labels—of the menagerie’s mislabeled cages, of the orator’s captive audience, of the “flawless system” that fits everything and explains nothing—and a corresponding loyalty to the formless, the shifting, and the crassly alive. The book belongs to its moment, with its war poems and its Pullman smokers, but its voice is Sapir’s own: a scientist of language writing verse that distrusts systems and prizes the unruly soul.
