From St. Nicholas magazine, December 1917.

Reblog if the Roman numeral at the top of the poem doubles as the answer to the rhetorical question.  From the Elson Primary School Reader, Book One, 1913.

Using our Tic-Tac-Toe Story Generator [instructions and template here], we can translate the game on this student's back into a poem:

A wish for experimental kisses,

unknowable              surprises,

the sun mysterious, shadowing.

(Photo from West Georgia's 1941 yearbook.)

Here's a precursor to Jamiroquai's marvelous lyric, "I steal the moon on silver nights" ("Automaton," 2017).  Not only are silver nights and the moon mentioned in the first stanza, but in the second stanza there's "a little song."  From The Ballad of the Quest by Virginia Sheard, 1922.

This is what we think when critics attempt to mar our workmanship.  "Could it be dissemination of some wicked defamation of our blameless reputation by some imp of hell's creation?"  From the Ole Miss yearbook of 1898.

Reblog if "oh heck" is your boyfriend.  From Queens College's 1955 yearbook.

From our 21st cousin, Emily Dickinson, quoted in Mansfield's 1969 yearbook.

"Some must take the good and some the evil / Dropped from either wing of this strange angel."  From "Al Hassan's Secret," in The Bird and the Bell by Christopher Pearse Cranch, 1890

A sense of the supernatural and the weird, bound up with a mysterious feeling of limitlessness and indefinitude that haunted him in his thoughts about this world and our earthly life.  The forms of another mysterious world, very near to this earth of ours, were seemingly present to his imagination.  From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click for a more theatrical look. From Judge's Library, 1894.

Out of himself, so to speak, and soaring in that strange supersensible region whence forms and 'things of unearthly make' visited him with a thrilling and subduing power."  From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.

"And when they coffined him, / They laid the lizard on his heart."  From Pearson's, 1902.

"And yet I lift my sightless face / Toward the eerie light, / And tread the lonely way we trace / Across the haunted night."  From The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell, 1905.

The reader is here invited with asterisks to fill in a portrait of a water-nymph according to fancy.  From Some Welsh Legends and Other Poems by John Humphreys Davies, 1893.

"If here at the end of ages this is all—a white face floating in the whirling ball."  From "A Leaf from the Devil's Jest-Book" by Edwin Markham, in The Man with the Hoe, 1899.

Here we learn that the moon has but a single eye, and it's ghostly.  From "The Wind and the Moon" by George Macdonald, in One Thousand Poems for Children, 1920.

We suspect the joke is in the very first panel, that the poet not only had a poem accepted but that he was paid for it, and paid in advance.  Hilarious!  From Judge's Library, 1895.