11.12.2026 – seek understanding

seek understanding
even misunderstanding
kind’ve understanding

To start off, the James Thurber drawing was first published in the New Yorker Magazine on November 12, 1938.

On the opposite page from the drawing was a poem by Morris Bishop titled, I Am the Corporal of My Soul.

The text of the poem is:

Life’s askew
In most regards,
But I can do
Tricks with cards.

Men succumb
To ennui.
Fleas bite some,
But not me.

Songs are stilled,
Teeth decay;
Mine were filled
Yesterday.

‘Mid the giggle
Of the spheres
I can wiggle
Both my ears.

Doom may smite,
Fortune flee;
I’m all right,
I’ve me.

In Mr. Bishop’s New York Times Obituary, Morris Bishop, Scholar and Poet, Dies By Alden Whitman (Nov. 22, 1973), Mr. Whitman wrote:

Morris Bishop, the Cornell scholar, literary biographer and master of light verse, died Tuesday at Tompkins County Hospital in Ithaca, N. Y., after a brief illness. He was 80 years old and lived in Cayuga Heights, an Ithaca suburb.

Although Professor Bishop had a formidable reputation as a savant and as the author of biographies of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Ronsard and Samuel de Champlain, a wider public knew him as an extraordinarily gifted writer of whimsical verse, much of it published in The New Yorker, and as a producer of elegant casual prose pieces.

From 1927 to 1960, Professor Bishop published about 15 Poems and casuals a year in The New Yorker, and many of the poems were collected in “A Bowl of Bishop” in 1954. Defining his verse at the time, He said:

“The aim of poetry, or Heavy Verse, is to seek understanding in the forms of beauty. The sum of light verse is to promote misunderstanding in beauty’s cast off clothes. But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding.”

Thusly, all this thusness led to today’s haiki being based on the line But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding.

But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding.

I like that.

I like that a lot.

But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding.