We encountered a charming wizard's song in "What If a Witch?" by Elaine McQueen (Ethos, 1964). 

I came from there

and now I'm here

and tomorrow I'll be

I don't know where ...

I'm a flunk at ghosts

I can't make toasts

and instead of boiling

my cauldron roasts ...

My name is ___,

a wizard by whim.

I spin magic marvels

when daytime grows dim ...

But you're all so friendly

I'll try to be good

and put all my magic

away in the wood.

"'And the stately ships go on / To their haven under the hill' — / Freighted with joys of banished years / The port of fond memory to fill."  From Salem's 1929 yearbook.

In the second line, we find "corse," the original spelling of "corpse."  The p, eventually added in honor of the Latin corpus, was initally silent.

From Peter Homunculus by Gilbert Cannan, 1909.

"What has he done?  I cannot say.  We'll find out to-morrow, and beat him today."  A century later, this isn't a nonsense rhyme but the way our "justice" system works.  From Nursery Rhymes, illustrated by Claud Lovat Fraser, 1922.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

Insomnia turns us into ghosts.  From Poems by B. D., 1880.

Typographical violets displace rivulets, and there's shining for shimmering.  A correction from Improvement Era, 1906.

From the dark depths of the human soul.  From Jugend, 1896.

Our Favorite Asterisk of All Time?

Check out the very special asterisk in this little verse from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle, 1887.  It stands for the word gloom (in all fairness, how much clarity can we expect of gloominess?) even as it concentrates what little light there is into a gleam in a house cat's eye.  Is the asterisk here a genuine example of visual poetry, or did the typesetter run out of space and improvise grandly?  We don't care, as the result stands.  (Note that we hunted down what would appear to be the web's only other gloomy asterisk, if only to give the cat's other eye a twinkle.)