class="i3">Was “spontaneous collision”—
(I am quoting the report)
And the skippers were commended who had fed
To the lobsters each a bellyful of dead.
An Emigrant
(After Tennyson)
You ask me why, though ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Where all defaulters fill the fist
Ere sailing o’er the western seas.
It is a land where one may kill
With sober-sided freedom—bruise
And shoot and stab whome’er he choose,
And thugs may wreak their own sweet will.
A land of such misgovernment
That Justice here has not a frown,
And greed still broadens slowly down,
From Scavenger to President;
Where Faction gathers to a head,
And in his greasy, foulest thought
Sets law and order all at naught—
Goes in for anarchy instead.
If banded unions prosecute
Our unions like the deuce, and I’m
About to be had up for crime,
Or made to keep my clapper mute;
And Power should take from purse and till,
The gains that I appropriate
From every coffer of the State,
And I to fight have not the will,
Then waft me from the harbor south,
Wild winds! I seek a safer sky,
Where I can plunder still, and I
Can still shoot off my loaded mouth.
Contempt of Court
So, Juror Simpson, you got drunk
And was a holy show!
Who could have thought that you had sunk
So very low
As not to hold it clearly sinful
To get your miserable skin full?
Defendant has a right, I think,
To trial by her peers;
Are you one when you are in drink
Up to your ears?
You’re not her equal by a pailful
When you’ve enough to make a whale full.
Judge Ross, who never, never looks
On wine when it is red,
But sits cold sober cramming books
Into his head,
Poor fellow! must have felt quite rueful,
Observing, not himself, but you full.
Ah, well, I know you did not mean—
’Twas all an accident:
You drank between drinks, and between
Them you repent.
But just prepare for something awful
In words: That jurist has his jaw full.
A Partial Eclipse
A Person of Consequence rose from the dead,
And to him a curious citizen said:
“Beg pardon, but why is your glorious name
Not blazoned in gold on the Temple of Fame?”
“I truly don’t know,” said the spook in reply,
“And was just on the point of asking you why
Those other names are.” And the risen one made
A wink that threw half of the land into shade,
Sent half of the hens to their perches aloof,
And half of the cats to the peak of a roof,
Half-crazed the foreseer of eclipses, and fooled
The funny left lobe of the brain of Miss Gould.
Beneath this casket rots unknown
A Thing that merits not a stone,
Save that by passing urchin cast;
Whose fame and virtues we express
By transient urn of emptiness,
With apt inscription (to its past
Relating—and to his): “Prime Mess.”
No honour had this infidel,
That doth not appertain, as well,
To haltered caitiff on the drop;
No wit that would not likewise pass
For wisdom in the famished ass
Who breaks his neck a weed to crop,
When tethered in the luscious grass.
And now, thank God, his hateful name
Shall never rescued be from shame,
Though seas of venal ink be shed;
No sophistry shall reconcile
With sympathy for Erin’s Isle,
Or sorrow for her patriot dead,
The weeping of this crocodile.
Life’s incongruity is past,
And dirt to dirt is seen at last,
The worm of worm afoul doth fall.
The sexton tolls his solemn bell
For scoundrel dead and gone to—well,
It matters not, it can’t recall
This convict from his final cell.
II
A King of Craft
Here lies Sam Chamberlain; his fatal smile
Survives its wielder for a little while
In nightmares of the prudent few who fled
The Judas kisses that it heralded—
Those all are dreamless who stood still to view
The smile that stayed them for the stab that slew.
Against his God his warfare now is o’er:
His bloodless heart (no colder than before)
No longer with a mute ambition swells
To run a half-a-hundred little Hells.
With ever a polite, perfidious art—
A dove in manner and a snake in heart,
This titmouse Machiavelli ne’er again
Will feel the urge, the passion and the strain
To prove it true that one may smile and smile
And be a Chamberlain the blessed while.
Sharp at both ends, his secret soul
Was like a double-headed mole
Equipped with equal nose to prod
This way or that beneath the sod.
Conjecture fitted to confound
If seen a moment out of ground—
Its former, as its future, route
The matter of a vain dispute,
Save where a dunghill’s lure supplied
Its aid the riddle to decide.
When that occurred (his nearer nose
Pointing the way with happier throes)
He sought it as a bee the rose.
And as that robber daubs its thighs
With pollen till it cannot rise,
So he, with glutted mind, remained
Inert, and Christ arose and reigned.
We raise the stone, we carve the solemn word,
The sign of promise and the symbol grim;
His voice and vice are in the land unheard—
Yet all is doubtful that relates to him.
No more he twirls his smile to work us woe;
We saw him put a fathom under sod:
Flung down at last—but so was Aaron’s rod.
We hope he’s dead, but only this we know:
He does not smile. O glory be to God!
III
Stephen Dorsey
Flee, heedless stranger, from this spot accurst,
Where rests in Satan an offender first
In point of greatness, as in point of time,
Of new-school rascals who proclaim their crime.
Skilled with a frank loquacity to blab
The dark arcana of each mighty grab,
And famed for lying from his early youth,
He sinned secure behind a veil of truth.
Some lock their lips upon their deeds; some write
A damning record and conceal from sight;
Some, with a lust of speaking, die to quell it.
His way to keep a secret was to tell it.
IV
