Poetry

lurkes
For to buste y^e crust, perdie,
Of y^e man from over sea,
A-synging as he werkes.
For he knows ful well, y^s youth,
A tricke of exceeding worth:
And he plans withouten ruth
A conflagration’s birth!

Samuel Shortridge

Like a worn mother he attempts in vain
To still the unruly Crier of his brain:
The more he rocks the cradle of his chin,
The more uproarious grows the brat within.

At a “National Encampment”

You’re grayer than one would have thought you:
The climate you have over there
In the East has apparently brought you
Disorders affecting the hair,
Which⁠—pardon me⁠—seems a bit spare.

You’ll not take offence at my giving
Expression to notions like these.
You might have been stronger if living
Out here in our sanative breeze.
It’s unhealthy here for disease.

No, I’m not as plump as a pullet,
But that’s the old wound, you see.
Remember my paunching a bullet?⁠—
And how that it didn’t agree
With⁠—well, honest hardtack for me.

Just pass me the wine⁠—I’ve a helly
And horrible kind of drouth!
When a fellow has that in his belly
Which didn’t go in at his mouth
He’s hotter than all Down South!

Great Scott! what a nasty day that was⁠—
When every galoot in our crack
Division who didn’t lie flat was
Dissuaded from further attack
By the bullet’s felicitous whack.

’Twas there that our major slept under
Some cannon of ours on the crest,
Till they woke him by stilling their thunder,
And he cursed them for breaking his rest,
And died in the midst of his jest.

That night⁠—it was late in November⁠—
The dead seemed uncommonly chill
To the touch; and one chap I remember
Who took it exceedingly ill
When I dragged myself over his bill.

Well, comrades, I’m off now⁠—good morning.
Your talk is as pleasant as pie,
But, pardon me, one word of warning:
Speak little and seldom, say I.
That’s my way. God bless you. Good-bye.

Theosophistry

Says Anderson, Theosophist:
“Among the many that exist
In modern halls.
Some lived in ancient Egypt’s clime,
And in their childhood saw the prime
Of Karnak’s walls.”

Ah, Anderson, if that is true
’Tis my conviction, sir, that you
Are one of those
That once resided by the Nile⁠—
Peer to the Sacred Crocodile,
Heir to his woes.

My judgment is, the Holy Cat
Mews through your larynx (and your hat)
These many years.
Through you the Hallowed Onion brings
Its melancholy sense of things,
And moves to tears.

In you the Bull Divine again
Bellows and paws the dusty plain,
To nature true.
I challenge not his ancient hate,
But, lowering my knurly pate,
Lock horns with you.

And though Reincarnation prove
A creed too stubborn to remove,
And all your school
Of Theosophs I cannot scare⁠—
All the more earnestly I swear
That you’re a fool!

You’ll say that this is mere abuse
Without, in fraying you, a use.
That’s plain to see
With only half an eye. Come, now,
Be fair, be fair⁠—consider how
It eases me.

Azrael

The moon in the field of the keel-plowed main
Was watching the growing tide;
A luminous peasant was driving his wain,
And he offered my soul a ride.

But I nourished a sorrow uncommonly tall,
And I fixed him fast with my eye.
“O, peasant,” I sang with a dying fall,
“Go leave me to sing and die.”

The water was weltering round my feet,
As prone on the beach they lay.
I chanted my death-song loud and sweet:
“Kioodle, ioodle, iay!”

Then I heard the swish of erecting ears
Which caught that enchanting strain.
The ocean was swollen with storms of tears
That fell from the shining swain.

“O, poet,” leapt he to the soaken strand,
“That ravishing song would make
The devil a saint!” He held out his hand
And solemnly added: “Shake.”

We shook. “I crave a victim, you see,”
He said⁠—“you came hither to die.”
The Angel of Death, ’twas he! ’twas he!
And the victim he crove was I!

’Twas I, Fred Emerson Brooks, the bard;
And he knocked me on the head.
O Lord! I thought it uncommonly hard,
For I didn’t want to be dead.

“You’ll sing no worser for that,” said he,
And he drove with my soul away.
O, death-song singers, be warned by me,
Kioodle, ioodle, iay!

Competition

The Seraphs came to Christ and said: “Behold!
The man, presumptuous and overbold,
Who boasted that his mercy could excel
Thine own, is dead and on his way to Hell.”

Gravely the Savior asked: “What did he do
To make his impious assertion true?”

“He was a Governor, releasing all
The vilest felons ever held in thrall.
No other mortal, since the dawn of time,
Has ever pardoned such a mass of crime!”

Christ smiled benignly on the Seraphim:
“Yet I am victor, for I pardon him.”

A Vision of Doom

I stood upon a hill. The setting sun
Was crimson with a curse and a portent,
And scarce his angry ray lit up the land
That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared
Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up
From dim tarns hateful with some horrid ban,
Took shapes forbidden and without a name.
Gigantic night-birds, rising from the reeds
With cries discordant, startled all the air,
And bodiless voices babbled in the gloom⁠—
The ghosts of blasphemies long ages stilled,
And shrieks of women, and men’s curses. All
These visible shapes, and sounds no mortal ear
Had ever heard, some spiritual sense
Interpreted, though brokenly; for I
Was haunted by a consciousness of crime,
Some giant guilt, but whose I knew not. All
These things malign, by sight and sound revealed,
Were sin-begotten; that I knew⁠—no more⁠—
And that but dimly, as in dreadful dreams
The sleepy senses babble to the brain
Imperfect witness. As I stood, a voice,
But whence it came I knew not, cried aloud
Some words to me in a forgotten tongue,
Yet straight I knew me for a ghost forlorn,
Returned from the illimited inane.
Again, but in a language that I knew,
As in reply to something which in me
Had shaped itself a thought, but found no words,
It spake from the dread mystery about:

“Immortal shadow of a mortal soul
That perished with eternity, attend.
What thou beholdest is as void as thou:
The shadow of a poet’s dream⁠—himself
As thou, his soul as thine, long dead,
But not like thine outlasted by its shade.
His dreams alone survive eternity
As pictures in the unsubstantial void.
Excepting thee and me (and we because
The