to “Boss” Shepherd by the dear
Good folk he lived and moved among in peace—
Guarded on either hand by the police,
With soldiers in his front and in his rear.
From Virginia to Paris
The polecat, sovereign of its native wood,
Dashes damnation upon bad and good;
The health of all the upas trees impairs
By exhalations deadlier than theirs;
Poisons the rattlesnake and warts the toad—
The creeks go rotten and the rocks corrode!
She shakes o’er breathless hill and shrinking dale
The horrid aspergillus of her tail!
From every saturated hair, till dry,
The spargent fragrances divergent fly,
Stifle the world and reek along the sky!
Removed to alien scenes, amid the strife
Of urban odors to ungladden life—
Where gas and sewers and dead dogs conspire
The flesh to torture and the soul to fire—
Where all the “well defined and several stinks”
Known to mankind hold revel and high jinks—
Humbled in spirit, smitten with a sense
Of lost distinction, leveled eminence,
Her powers atrophied, her vigor sunk,
She lives deodorized, a sweeter skunk.
A “Mute Inglorious Milton”
“O, I’m the Unaverage Man,
But you never have heard of me,
For my brother, the Average Man, outran
My fame with rapiditee,
And I’m sunk in Oblivion’s sea;
But my bully big brother the world can span
With his wide notorietee.
I do everything that I can
To make ’em attend to me,
But the papers ignore the Unaverage Man
With a weird uniformitee.”
So sang with a dolorous note
A voice that I heard from the beach;
On the sable waters it seemed to float
Like a mortal part of speech.
The sea was Oblivion’s sea,
And I cried as I plunged to swim:
“The Unaverage Man shall reside with me.”
But he didn’t—I stayed with him!
The Free Trader’s Lament
Oft from a trading-boat I purchased spice
And shells and corals, brought for my inspection
From the fair tropics—paid a Christian price
And was content in my fool’s paradise,
Where never had been heard the word “Protection.”
’Twas my sole island; there I dwelt alone—
No customs-house, collector nor collection,
But a man came who in a pious tone
Condoled with me that I had never known
The manifest advantage of Protection.
So, when the trading-boat arrived one day
He threw a stink-pot into its mid-section.
The traders paddled for their lives away,
Nor came again into that haunted bay,
The blessed home thereafter of Protection.
Then down he sat, that philanthropic man,
And spat upon some mud of his selection,
And worked it, with his knuckles in a pan
To shapes of shells and coral things, and span
A thread of song in glory of Protection.
He baked them in the sun. His air devout
Enchanted me. I made a genuflection:
“God help you, gentle sir,” I said. “No doubt,”
He answered gravely, “I’ll get on without
Assistance now that we have got Protection.”
Thenceforth I bought his wares—at what a price
For shells and corals of such imperfection!
“Ah, now,” said he, “your lot is truly nice.”
But still in all that isle there was no spice
To season to my taste that dish, Protection.
Subterranean Phantasies
I died. As meekly in the earth I lay,
With shriveled fingers reverently folded,
The worm—uncivil engineer!—my clay
Tunneled industriously, and the mole did.
My body could not dodge them, but my soul did;
For that had flown from this terrestrial ball
And I was rid of it for good and all.
So there I lay, debating what to do—
What measures might most usefully be taken
To circumvent the subterranean crew
Of anthropophagi and save my bacon.
My fortitude was all this while unshaken,
But any gentleman, of course, protests
Against receiving uninvited guests.
However proud he might be of his meats,
Not even Apicius, nor, I think, Lucullus,
Wasted on tramps his culinary sweets;
“Aut Caesar,” say judicious hosts, “aut nullus.”
And though when Marcius came unbidden Tullus
Aufidius feasted him because he starved,
Marcius by Tullus afterward was carved.
We feed the hungry, as the book commands
(For men might question else our orthodoxy)
But do not care to see the outstretched hands,
And so we minister to them by proxy.
When Want, in his improper person, knocks he
Finds we’re engaged. The graveworm’s very fresh
To think we like his presence in the flesh.
So, as I said, I lay in doubt; in all
That underworld no judges could determine
My rights. When Death approaches them they fall,
And falling, naturally soil their ermine.
And still below ground, as above, the vermin
That work by dark and silent methods win
The case—the burial case that one is in.
Cases at law so slowly get ahead,
Even when the right is visibly unclouded,
That if all men are classed as quick and dead,
The judges all are dead, though some unshrouded.
Pray Jove that when they’re actually crowded
On Styx’s brink, and Charon rows in sight,
His bark prove worse than Cerberus’s bite.
Ah! Cerberus, if you had but begot
A race of three-mouthed dogs for man to nourish
And woman to caress, the muse had not
Lamented the decay of virtues currish,
And triple-hydrophobia now would flourish,
For barking, biting, kissing to employ
Canine repeaters were indeed a joy.
Lord! how we cling to this vile world! Here I,
Whose dust was laid ere I began this carping,
By moles and worms and such familiar fry
Run through and through, am singing still and harping
Of mundane matters—flatting, too, and sharping.
I hate the Angel of the Sleeping-Cup:
So I’m for getting—and for shutting—up.
In Memoriam
Beauty (they called her) wasn’t a maid
Of many things in the world afraid.
She wasn’t a maid who turned and fled
At sight of a mouse, alive or dead.
She wasn’t a maid a man could “shoo”
By shouting, however abruptly, “Boo!”
She wasn’t a maid who’d run and hide
If her face and figure you idly eyed.
She wasn’t a maid who’d blush and shake
When asked what part of the fowl she’d take.
(I blush myself to confess she preferred,
And commonly got, the most of the bird.)
She wasn’t a maid to simper because
She was asked to sing—if she ever was.
In short, if the truth must be displayed
All naked—Beauty wasn’t a maid.
Beauty, furry and fine and fat,
Yawny and clawy, sleek and all that,
Was a pampered and spoiled Angora cat!
I
