Famous Poems from Bygone Days
Page 12
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
The fire burst out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For that willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin’ and cursin’, but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
“I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
Through the hot, black breath of the burnin’ boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He weren’t no saint,—but at jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside of some pious gentleman
That wouldn’t shake hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
The Stirrup-Cup
My short and happy day is done,
The long and dreary night comes on,
And at my door the pale horse stands
To carry me to unknown lands.
His whinny shrill, his pawing hoof,
Sound dreadful as a gathering storm;
And I must leave this sheltering roof
And joys of life so soft and warm.
Tender and warm the joys of life,—
Good friends, the faithful and the true;
My rosy children and my wife,
So sweet to kiss, so fair to view,—
So sweet to kiss, so fair to view:
The night comes down, the lights burn blue;
And at my door the pale horse stands
To bear me forth to unknown lands.
J. MILTON HAYES
(?–?)
ACCORDING TO Michael Turner, in Parlour Poetry (1967 edition), this tragic tale of Mad Carew was first published in 1911 in Reynold’s Musical Monologues, with music by Cuthbert Clarke, and was a favorite recitation of Bransby Williams, a music-hall entertainer.
Alec Waugh, in My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles, identifies Hayes as a North Country actor, and quotes him as saying:
“I wrote ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’ in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn’t poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do. It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere. Then India, everyone has his own idea of India. Don’t tell the public too much. Strike chords. It’s no good describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself. All you’ve got to say is ‘India’ and a man sees something. Then play on his susceptibilities.
“ ‘His name was Mad Carew.’ You’ve got the whole man there. The public will fill in the picture for you. And then the mystery. Leave enough unsaid to make paterfamilias pat himself on the back, ‘I’ve spotted it, he can’t fool me. I’m up to that dodge. I know where he went.’ No need to explain. Then that final ending where you began. It carries people back. You’ve got a compact whole.”
I was unable to learn anything further about Hayes, not even his birth and death years, and would be grateful to anyone who can tell me something about him. Is this the only poem he wrote?
The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
He was known as “Mad Carew” by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.
He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.
He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.
On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars;
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.
He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel’s daughter watched beside his bed.
He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying, “That’s from Mad Carew,”
And she found the little green eye of the god.
She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn’t take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he’d chanced his life to get.
When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hastened to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro’ the gloom.
His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp’ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
’Twas the “Vengeance of the Little Yellow God.”
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
GEORGE HOEY
(?–?)
I HAVE LEARNED nothing about George Hoey, or if he is indeed the author of “Asleep at the Switch,” or whether the name is a pseudonym. He is credited for the ballad in The Speaker’s Garland 4, no. 16 (1879), and in many later “speakers,” though usually the poem is without a byline. There are slight differences of words and punctuation in various reprintings of the poem. The version here is from the anthology cited.
Asleep at the Switch
The first thing that I remember was Carlo tugging away
With the sleeve of my coat fast in his teeth, pulling, as much as to say:
“Come, master, awake, attend to the switch, lives now depend upon you,
Think of the souls in the coming train, and the graves you are sending them to.
Think of the mother and the babe at her breast, think of the father and son,
Think of the lover and loved one too, think of them doomed every one
To fall (as it were by your very hand) into yon fathomless ditch,
Murdered by one who should guard them from harm, who now lies asleep at the switch.”
I sprang up amazed—scarce knew where I stood, sleep had o’ermastered me so;
I could hear the wind hollowly howling, and the deep river dashing below,
I could hear the forest leaves rustling, as the trees by the tempest were fanned,
But what was that noise in t
he distance? That, I could not understand.
I heard it at first indistinctly, like the rolling of some muffled drum,
Then nearer and nearer it came to me, till it made my very ears hum;
What is this light that surrounds me and seems to set fire to my brain?
What whistle’s that, yelling so shrill? Ah! I know now; it’s the train.
We often stand facing some danger and seem to take root to the place;
So I stood—with this demon before me, its heated breath scorching my face;
Its headlight made day of the darkness and glared like the eyes of some witch,—
The train was almost upon me before I remembered the switch.
I sprang to it, seizing it wildly, the train dashing fast down the track;
The switch resisted my efforts, some devil seemed holding it back;
On, on came the fiery-eyed monster, and shot by my face like a flash;
I swooned to the earth the next moment, and knew nothing after the crash.
How long I lay there unconscious ’twas impossible for me to tell;
My stupor was almost a heaven, my waking almost a hell,—
For I then heard the piteous moaning and shrieking of husbands and wives,
And I thought of the day we all shrink from, when I must account for their lives;
Mothers rushed by me like maniacs, their eyes glaring madly and wild;
Fathers, losing their courage, gave way to their grief like a child;
Children searching for parents, I noticed, as by me they sped,
And lips, that could form naught but “Mamma,” were calling for one perhaps dead.
My mind was made up in a moment, the river should hide me away,
When, under the still burning rafters I suddenly noticed there lay
A little white hand: she who owned it was doubtless an object of love
To one whom her loss would drive frantic, tho’ she guarded him now from above;
I tenderly lifted the rafters and quietly laid them one side;
How little she thought of her journey when she left for this dark fatal ride!
I lifted the last log from off her, and while searching for some spark of life,
Turned her little face up in the starlight, and recognized—Maggie, my wife!
O Lord! thy scourge is a hard one, at a blow thou hast shattered my pride;
My life will be one endless nightmare, with Maggie away from my side.
How often I’d sat down and pictured the scenes in our long, happy life;
How I’d strive through all my life time, to build up a home for my wife;
How people would envy us always in our cozy and neat little nest;
How I should do all of the labor, and Maggie should all the day rest;
How one of God’s blessings might cheer us, how some day I p’raps should be rich;—
But all of my dreams have been shattered, while I laid there asleep at the switch!
I fancied I stood on my trial, the jury and judge I could see;
And every eye in the court room was steadily fixed upon me;
And fingers were pointed in scorn, till I felt my face blushing blood-red,
And the next thing I heard were the words, “Hanged by the neck until dead.”
Then I felt myself pulled once again, and my hand caught tight hold of a dress,
And I heard, “What’s the matter, dear Jim? You’ve had a bad nightmare, I guess!”
And there stood Maggie, my wife, with never a scar from the ditch.
I’d been taking a nap in my bed, and had not been “Asleep at the switch.”
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
(1809–1894)
I HAVE FRAMED on a wall the pearly shell of a chambered nautilus, neatly sliced in half to disclose its beautiful spiral. Holmes’s famous poem is pasted on the back. No one before or since has written so movingly about this ancient cephalopod whose ancestors go back to the Ordovician period, earlier even than fishes.
This clever little “living fossil” (it almost vanished with the dinosaurs) uses its small tentacles, aided by spurts of water from its head, to swim backward through night seas in search of food. It invented the submarine. By adjusting the amount of seawater in its chambers, it can alter the depth at which it scavenges. Its primitive eye is like a pinhole camera—no lens or eyelids, just an open pupil. In Holmes’s day it was thought that the nautilus added a new chamber every year. Recent research shows it can build a new compartment in three to seven months.
“The Chambered Nautilus” appeared in Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table after an earlier printing in the Atlantic Monthly (February 1858). Holmes originated the poem’s metrical form, and always considered it his finest poem. Merle Johnson, in You Know These Lines!, quotes Holmes as saying:
In writing the poem I was filled with a better feeling—the highest state of mental exaltation and the most crystalline clairvoyance, as it seemed to me, that had ever been granted me—I mean that lucid vision of one’s thought, and of all forms of expression which will be at once precise and musical, which is the poet’s special gift, however large or small in amount or value.
The line about Triton and his wreathed horn is taken, of course, from the last line of Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us,” the penultimate inclusion in Best Remembered Poems. In that book you will also find three of Holmes’s better known poems as well as details about his life.
Here is how Holmes, in The Autocrat, introduced the poem:
Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, or Burns, or Wordsworth just now, to show you what thoughts were suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object, suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells to which is given the name of “pearly nautilus.” The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?
The Chambered Nautilus
This is the ship of pearl which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
THOM
AS HOOD
(1799–1845)
HOOD’S “SONG OF THE SHIRT” and “Bridge of Sighs” are in Best Remembered Poems along with a brief account of his career. “I Remember, I Remember” is another poem by this prolific versifier that was enormously admired in Hood’s day.
I Remember, I Remember
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn:
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.
I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white;
The violets and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,—
The tree is living yet!
I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing;
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing:
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!
I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;