ghosts and money

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It’s lost. All that is known of the poem are the following lines:

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Where the rude din of this…century Can trouble him no more.

This fragment carries a special power for me, as if I last heard it in the nursery. I seem, alas, to have set it on an internal loop to the tune of ‘Camptown Races’, that catchy chronicle of running and gambling. It drives me crazy when I can’t make it stop. Can trouble him no more! Trouble him no more! His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Can trouble him no more! There’s no sense trying to guess the author: these lines were written when he was nine years old. Kids could write like this in the nineteenth century, if they were bright and had the right schooling. Oscar Wilde turned out reams of such stuff, and not only when he was a child.

more from Granta here.