A poem by Theodore Roethke -- apparently not included in his Collected Poems or the later Words for the Wind -- is reprinted in Joachim Remak's The Origins of World War I, 1871-1914, Berkshire Studies in History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. [ii]. Remak's copyright page assigns the poem a 1963 date and credits it to Steuben Glass). [I had not found the poem but, ten years after first writing this note, I've been informed by Mr. Jeffrey Roberts of Massachusetts that it appeared originally in a promotional volume for its crystal sculptures published by Steuben Glass: Poetry in Crystal: Interpretations in Crystal of Thirty-one New Poems by Contemporary American Poets (New York: [Steuben Glass], 1963), p. 50. Annoyingly, the volume has been just a few feet away from me during this entire time.] Not well enough known, "The Victorians," as the poem is entitled, depicts a world that, like the world depicted in works such as Isabel Colegate's 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, would end (or be transformed) quite suddenly after August of 1914, when, from some points of view, the twentieth century, just as suddenly, began.
O the gondolets, the mandolins, the twanging of the lutes,
The girls all dressed in crinoline among the flowers and fruits --

The flowers all symbolical, the lily and the rose,
And how the sherry blossomed on the end of grandma's nose.

The maiden sighs and turns away, the maiden she relents,
Attracted by the glitter of a pile of five per cents.

They danced beneath the arbors, they strolled upon the grass,
O never aware, O never aware of what would come to pass.

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