Poets Ranked by Beard Weight

from A Journey Round My Skull.

"As will be noted, Underwood awards the highest ranking to Samuel F. B. Morse, laconic linguist and perfecter of the practical telegraph, whose name will be forever linked with that ingenious system of stripped-down prosody masterfully devised for conveying writing over distances by means of a wire which enabled him to transmit from Washington to Baltimore the immortal message: "What hath God wrought." In conferring the prize upon Morse, Underwood cites both the prominence of his whiskerage and the pre-eminence of his poetic gravity ratio, and recalls the little-known circumstances of Morse's poignant demise: "...as the eminent inventor-poet lay on his deathbed huskily breathing his last, and dusk and death's shadow competed to cast their palls over the hushed, but crowded room, vigil-keepers gasped as a sparrow descended from a nearby wire, lit at the windowsill, and began to tap rapidly with its tiny beak." Perhaps the bewildering bird was only attracted by the nest-worthiness of Morse's monolithic mass of whiskers. But, instead of flitting to nestle in the cottony tufts of the moribund seer's chin-fringe, the sparrow, according to astonished onlookers, tapped on the sill in perfect telegraphic code "…that nurtureth speech from silence…," at the precise moment the old sage expired. The testimony of the numerous sober witnesses to this incident is a matter of historical record."