MOO

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

May I offer a slight correction to your admirable account of my affair with that cow (in the CRIMSON of Saturday, May 1). The consolatory verses that you quoted were of course only a remodeling of the well-known lines from Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubalyat of Omar Khayam:

A jug of wine a loaf of bread, and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness:

Ah, wilderness were paradise onow!

For the words "and thou" I substituted "a cow," for "singing" the word "grazing" and for "wilderness" the words "Harvard Yard." My substitutions left the number of syllables and accents in these lines unchanged. This is about all that can be said for my pleasantry, but this much at least was true. Your version of my third line, however, runs "Ah, would that Harvard Yard were paradise now," and this not only adds two words and an extra metrical foot to the line but also (and here I speak) with all the pedantry at my command) changes Fitzgerald’s rather archaic "were." meaning "would be" in the apodosis of a conditional sentence, into part of an portative construction, expressing a wish. To my car this conveys a little more fervor about the Yard than more gallantry to the cow would require. Robert Fitzgerald   Lecturer on English