Famous Poems from Bygone Days
Page 3
“Your name,” said the judge, as he eyed her
With a kindly look, yet keen;
“Is Mary McGuire, if you please, sir.”
“And your age?” “I’m turned fifteen.”
“Well, Mary,”—and then from a paper
He slowly and gravely read,
“You are charged here—I’m sorry to say it—
With stealing three loaves of bread.
“You look not like an offender,
And I hope that you can show
The charge to be false. Now, tell me
Are you guilty of this, or no?”
A passionate burst of weeping
Was at first her sole reply,
But she dried her eyes in a moment
And looked in the judge’s eye.
“I will tell you just how it was, sir;
My father and mother are dead,
And my little brother and sisters
Were hungry, and asked me for bread.
At first I earned it for them
By working hard all day,
But somehow times were bad, sir,
And the work all fell away.
“I could get no more employment;
The weather was bitter cold;
The young ones cried and shivered—
Little Johnny’s but four years old;
So, what was I to do, sir?
I am guilty, but do not condemn,
I took—oh, was it stealing?—
The bread to give to them.”
Every man in the court-room—
Graybeard and thoughtless youth—
Knew, as he looked upon her,
That the prisoner told the truth.
Out of their pockets brought ’kerchiefs,
Out from their eyes sprung tears,
And out from old faded wallets
Treasures hoarded for years.
The judge’s face was a study,
The strangest you ever saw,
As he cleared his throat and murmured
Something about the law;
For one so learned in such matters,
So wise in dealing with men,
He seemed on a simple question
Sorely puzzled just then.
But no one blamed him, or wondered,
When at last these words they heard:
“The sentence of this young prisoner
Is, for the present, deferred.”
And no one blamed him, or wondered
When he went to her and smiled,
And tenderly led from the court-room
Himself, the “guilty” child.
ANONYMOUS
THIS PLEASANT little lyric turns up in dozens of pre-1900 anthologies, never with a byline. Where the editors found it, who knows?
When Mamma Was a Little Girl
When mamma was a little girl
(Or so they say to me)
She never used to romp and run,
Nor shout and scream with noisy fun,
Nor climb an apple tree.
She always kept her hair in curl,—
When mamma was a little girl.
When mamma was a little girl
(It seems to her, you see)
She never used to tumble down,
Nor break her doll, nor tear her gown,
Nor drink her papa’s tea.
She learned to knit, “plain,” “seam,” and “purl,”—
When mamma was a little girl.
But grandma says—it must be true—
“How fast the seasons o’er us whirl!
Your mamma, dear, was just like you,
When she was grandma’s little girl.”
MABEL DOW (NORTHAM) BRINE
(1816–1913)
I HAVE uncovered nothing about Mabel Brine beyond the fact that she was born in New York and the author of numerous books of short stories and verse, mostly for children. “Somebody’s Mother,” her one famous poem, first appeared in Harper’s Weekly (March 2, 1878), and later in Madge, the Violet Girl and Other Poems (New York, 1881). An illustrated twelve-page edition of the poem, titled Somebody’s Mother, was printed in Bavaria and distributed in America by Dutton in 1891.
I can’t help recalling the joke about the boy scout who came home with a black eye. When his mother asked what happened, he said he had tried to help an old lady across the street, but she didn’t want to go.
Somebody’s Mother
The woman was old and ragged and gray
And bent with the chill of the Winter’s day.
The street was wet with a recent snow
And the woman’s feet were aged and slow.
She stood at the crossing and waited long,
Alone, uncared for, amid the throng
Of human beings who passed her by
Nor heeded the glance of her anxious eye.
Down the street, with laughter and shout,
Glad in the freedom of “school let out,”
Came the boys like a flock of sheep,
Hailing the snow piled white and deep.
Past the woman so old and gray
Hastened the children on their way.
Nor offered a helping hand to her—
So meek, so timid, afraid to stir
Lest the carriage wheels or the horses’ feet
Should crowd her down in the slippery street.
At last came one of the merry troop,
The gayest laddie of all the group;
He paused beside her and whispered low,
“I’ll help you cross, if you wish to go.”
Her aged hand on his strong young arm
She placed, and so, without hurt or harm,
He guided the trembling feet along,
Proud that his own were firm and strong,
Then back again to his friends he went,
His young heart happy and well content.
“She’s somebody’s mother, boys, you know,
For all she’s aged and poor and slow.
“And I hope some fellow will lend a hand
To help my mother, you understand,
“If ever she’s poor and old and gray,
When her own dear boy is far away.”
And “somebody’s mother” bowed low her head
In her home that night, and the prayer she said
Was “God be kind to the noble boy,
Who is somebody’s son, and pride and joy!”
THOMAS EDWARD BROWN
(1830–1897)
A PRIEST in the Church of England, Father Brown was born on the Isle of Man, and after studying at Oxford, taught at several boys’ schools in England. He turned out at least five books of verse, and his Collected Poems was published posthumously in 1900. Much of his poetry was written in Manx dialect.
Only one lyric became famous, “My Garden.” I can’t resist following it with a parody by James Albert Lindon (1914–1979), my favorite British writer of comic verse. It appeared in Yet More Curious & Comic Verse, selected by J. M. Cohen (Penguin, 1959) and is included here with the author’s permission.
My Garden
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot—
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not—
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign:
’Tis very sure God walks in mine.
My Garden (by J. A. Lindon)
A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot!
Weed plot,
Scum pool,
Old pot,
Snail-shiny stool
In pieces; yet the fool
Contends that snails are not—
Not snails! in gardens! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I see their trails!
’Tis very sure my garden’s full of snails!
ROB
ERT BROWNING
(1812–1889)
BEST REMEMBERED POEMS included two Browning lyrics, “Meeting at Night” and “Pippa’s Song.” Perhaps even more admired and anthologized in the nineteenth century was “Prospice,” a Latin word meaning “look forward.” Written shortly after his wife’s death, it is surely the greatest poem in English on how faith in immortality can combat a fear of dying. The poem was set to music by C. V. Stafford.
Prospice
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my fate,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Tho’ a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
JOHN WILLIAM BURGON
(1813–1888)
MANY AUTHORS in this collection, and in my previous anthology, are remembered today, if at all, for just one single poem. Reverend Burgon is a “one-line poet.” His fame rests solely on one line in his long and long-forgotten poem “Petra”:
A rose-red city half as old as Time.
Born in Smyrna, Turkey, Burgon grew up in England where he took holy orders at Worcester College, Oxford. For thirteen years he was vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford, and for twelve years until his death he was dean of Chichester. His numerous books include controversial Biblical studies, biographies and collections of sermons.
Petra was a mysterious ancient city in Jordan, near Mount Hor where Aaron died and was buried according to the biblical account in Numbers 20: 25–28. The ancient city of Petra is currently in the news because of recent archaeological digs. In 1990 a Byzantine church, rich in striking mosaics, was uncovered there, but the 2000-year-old city, of perhaps 30,000 inhabitants, remains buried under sand. (Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed among the colorful ruins of Petra.)
Petra was the capital of the Nabatean pagan empire. The Nabatean kingdom, annexed by Rome in 106, was a flourishing trading center until it was reduced to rubble by violent earthquakes in 363 and 551. Muslims took it over in the seventh century.
Petra (Greek for “rock”) is almost certainly the city called Selah in the Old Testament. The area is noted for its red sandstone mountains, its hundreds of sandstone caves and its stupendous tombs carved out of the rock. Their color gives the region the rosy hues noted in Burgon’s famous line.
Lord Dunsany’s short fantasy “The Expulsion” (in The Fourth Book of Jorkens) is about a nineteenth-century poets’ club in London that expelled Burgon. The reason: a minor poet named Rogers (Samuel Rogers?) accused Burgon of stealing part of his line from a poem he (Rogers) had written: “By many a temple half as old as time.” Burgon’s ghost explains to Jorkens that he lifted the phrase without thinking: “Nobody steals jewelry out of a jeweler’s shop,” Burgon’s shade says, just before fading away. “But if you see a fine brooch lying about on a grocer’s counter among shavings of carrot and sticks of licorice, one is so surprised, that perhaps unconsciously—.”
Burgon’s poem won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1845 and was published as a small book the following year. The final couplet of the excerpt given here was so widely quoted that many anonymous parodies circulated around England. James Sutherland, in his Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975), recalls a parody aimed at an aged Oxford don, The Reverend Thomas Short:
Match me such marvel, save in college port,
That rose-red liquor half as old as Short.
Petra (excerpt)
It seems no work of man’s creative hand,
By labour wrought as wavering fancy plann’d,
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
Not virgin-white like the old Doric shrine
Where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
That crowns the hill, and consecrates the plain;
But rosy-red as if the blush of dawn
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which man deemed old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city half as old as Time.
JOHN BURROUGHS
(1837–1921)
BURROUGHS’ FAME RESTS, of course, on his many books of essays about nature. Born near Roxbury, New York, he had an early career as a school teacher, studied medicine for a while and worked as a bank examiner. His nature writing was done at his home on a fruit farm near Esopa, New York, in an isolated cabin he called Slabsides. A devoted friend of Walt Whitman, he wrote Whitman’s first biography.
“Waiting” expresses Burroughs’ secular pantheism. Like the great pantheist Spinoza, Burroughs believed that the future is predetermined—it has to be whatever it will be, so why not relax and stoically accept all that happens to you, both good and bad? He once said his poem was about Baptist predestination, “watered down or watered up.”
Written when Burroughs was twenty-five, “Waiting” first appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine (Vol. 61, 1863, page 201). He used it as a preface to his book The Light of Day, and later included it in his one book of verse, Bird and Bough (1906). Whittier, who knew the poem by heart, put it in his anthology Songs of Three Centuries.
Burton Stevenson, in Famous Single Poems, reveals that the original poem had an extra stanza between the fifth and last:
Yon floweret nodding in the wind
Is ready plighted to the bee;
And, maiden, why that look unkind?
For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee.
As Burroughs himself realized, dropping this stanza greatly improves the poem. Stevenson also discloses that later in life Burroughs added an equally mediocre stanza at the end of the poem. As far as I know, Stevenson was the first to publish it. I have never seen it elsewhere:
The law of love threads every heart
And knits it to its utmost kin,
Nor can our lives flow long apart
From souls our secret souls would win.
Waiting
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more ’gainst time or fate,
For, lo! my own shall come to me.
I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.
Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.
What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
Andy garner
up its fruit of tears.
The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.
The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER
(1825–1902)
ALTHOUGH WILLIAM BUTLER, an Albany-born New York City attorney and civic leader, wrote two novels, four biographies and scores of poems, he became a sterling example of the “one-poem poet”—a person remembered only for a single piece of doggerel.
“Nothing to Wear” appeared anonymously in Harper’s Weekly (February 7, 1857). When the editor told Butler he needed twenty-four more lines to fill out the last page, Buder obligingly supplied them, though we don’t know which lines they were. As usual with anonymous verse that makes an instant hit, several charlatans at once claimed to have written it, including a pesky teenaged girl named Peck. Such claims faded after the poem appeared in Butler’s book Nothing to Wear. An Episode of City Life (1857), with illustrations by Augustus Hoppin.