My Virtual Reading Room

EXPERIENCE TO LET

Experience is a futile teacher,
Experience is a prosy preacher,
Experience is a fruit-tree fruitless,
Experience is a shoe-tree bootless.

For sterile wearience and drearience,
Depend, my boy, upon experience.
The burnt child, urged by rankling ire,
Can hardly wait to get back at the fire,

And, mulcted in the gambling den,
Men stand in line to gamble again.
Who says that he can drink or not?
The sober man?  Nay nay, the sot.

He who has never tasted jail
Lives well within the legal pale,
While he who's served a heavy sentence
Renews the racket, not repentance.

The nation bankrupt by a war
Thinks to recoup with just one more;
The wretched golfer, divot-bound,
Persists in dreams of the perfect round.

Life's little suckers chirp like crickets
While spending their all on losing tickets.
People whose instinct instructs them naught
But must by experience be taught,

Will never learn by suffering once,
But ever and ever play the dunce.
Experience! Wise men do not need it!
Experience! Idiots do not heed it!

I'd trade my lake of experience
For just one drop of common sense.

(Ogden Nash)