

I tried to find the text of that Gardner essay, but failed, although it’s available at this site if you have the right credentials.

The line later became the title of an essay about this “one-poem poet” written by Martin Gardner. His most well-known work is the poem “Evolution”, which begins with the line “When you were a tadpole and I was a fish”. Langdon Smith (4 January 1858 – 8 April 1908) was an American journalist and author. Here’s the Wiki page of the poem’s author: Call me a sap if you wish (or worse), but I still really like the poem.

Those are just the first two verses of thirteen and a half, some of which still give me a chuckle and some an involuntary chill when I read them. Till we caught our breath from the womb of death The world turned on in the lathe of time, And its rhymes are so clever:Īnd deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift Even at the age of ten it amused me and also moved me, and you know what? It still does. When I was a child of around ten, one semi-bored day I came across the light-verse poem “ Evolution” in a book on a shelf in my house.
