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Vintage Colorado Poetry Poem of the Week October 20, 2003

Humorist and poet Eugene Field earned his livelihood working for newspapers.  Field was an editor with the Denver Tribune in the early 1880s.  He died in Chicago in 1895 at age forty-five.  He was known in newsrooms for his love of practical jokes.

Pike's Peak's Philosophic Burro

I stood upon the peak amid the air---    Below me laid the peopled, living earth; Life, life and life again was everywhere,    And everywhere was melody and mirth, Save on that Peak and silence brooded there. I vaunted there myself and half aloud    I gloried in the victory I had won, Forsaking earth and earth's bewildering crowd    I'd climbed the steeps, despite the rocks and sun It was a feat that really made me proud! And as I brooded thus my burro brayed;    I turned, a tear was in the creature's eye, And as I looked methought the burro said,    "What brought you up, good sir, this mountain          high? Was it your legs or mine the journey made? There is no peak as high and steep as Fame's,    And there be many on its very height, Who strut in pride and vaunt their empty claims,    While those who toiled with sturdy, honest might And placed them there, have unremembered names!" December 1st, 1881.          --Eugene Field

Reprinted from A Little Book of Tribune Verse, Denver, 1901.