midnight
He could dispatch a dozen poems in almost as many minutes , and not slight them , either ; but he no longer jumped to his work . He was aware of trying to cheat himself in it , of pretending that the brief space between titles in the table of contents , which naturally implied a poem , sometimes really indicated a short bit of prose . He would run his eye hastily over an index , and seek to miss rather than find the word `` poem '' repeated after a title , and when this ruse succeeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped with the utmost unwillingness . If his behavior was sinful , he was duly punished for it , in the case of a magazine which he took up well toward midnight , rejoicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it . But his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small-print paragraph at the bottom of the page , and he perceived , on close inspection , that these were all poems , and that there were eighteen of them . He calculated , roughly , that he had read from eighty-five to a hundred poems before he finished ; after a while he ceased to take accurate count as he went on , but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that his guess was reasonably correct . From this review it appeared that the greater number of the magazines published two poems in each month , while several published but one , and several five or seven or four .