Famous Poems from Bygone Days
Page 9
“With some sawdust and bark
I could stuff in the dark
An owl better than that.
I could make an old hat
Look more like an owl
Than that horrid fowl,
Stuck up there so stiff like a side of coarse leather.
In fact, about him there’s not one natural feather.”
Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch,
The owl, very gravely, got down from his perch,
Walked round, and regarded his fault-finding critic
(Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic
And then fairly hooted, as if he would say:
“Your learning’s at fault this time, any way;
Don’t waste it again on a live bird, I pray.
I’m an owl; you’re another. Sir Critic, good-day!”
And the barber kept on shaving.
FRANCIS MILES FINCH
(1827–1907)
BORN IN ITHACA, New York, and a Yale graduate, Finch became dean of the College of Law at Cornell University, after serving for a time as a judge on the New York Court of Appeals. His one claim to literary immortality, “The Blue and the Gray,” first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1867). It is said to have been inspired by hearing about women who on Memorial Day put flowers on the graves of both Northern and Southern soldiers. Finch’s book, The Blue and the Gray and Other Verses (1909), was posthumous. It seems incredible now that just a few generations ago the United States was engulfed in a civil war as bitter and bloody, perhaps as avoidable, as the latter-day conflict in what was Yugoslavia.
Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is, of course, the greatest of all poems inspired by the Civil War—it is in Best Remembered Poems—but Finch’s impartial verse runs a close second. Finch’s “The Blue and the Gray” was not the only poem with the same title. I have added here two others, both anonymous. I found the first in The Speaker’s Garland 5, no. 20 (1881), and the second in Slason Thompson’s anthology The Humbler Poets (1899).
The Blue and the Gray
By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the one, the Blue,
Under the other, the Gray.
These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the laurel, the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.
From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the roses, the Blue,
Under the lilies, the Gray.
So with an equal splendor,
The morning sun-rays fall,
With a touch impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Broidered with gold, the Blue,
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.
So, when the summer calleth,
On forest and field of grain,
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Wet with the rain, the Blue,
Wet with the rain, the Gray.
Sadly, but not with upbraiding,
The generous deed was done,
In the storm of the years that are fading
No braver battle was won:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the blossoms, the Blue,
Under the garlands, the Gray.
No more shall the war cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Love and tears for the Blue,
Tears and love for the Gray.
The Blue and the Gray (Anonymous)
“O mother! what do they mean by blue?
And what do they mean by gray?”
Was heard from the lips of a little child
As she bounded in from play.
The mother’s eyes filled up with tears;
She turned to her darling fair,
And smoothed away from the sunny brow
Its treasure of golden hair.
“Why, mother’s eyes are blue, my sweet,
And grandpa’s hair is gray,
And the love we bear our darling child
Grows stronger every day.”
“But what did they mean?” persisted the child;
“For I saw two cripples to-day,
And one of them said he fought for the blue,
The other, he fought for the gray.
“Now, he of the blue had lost a leg,
And the other had but one arm,
And both seemed worn and weary and sad,
Yet their greeting was kind and warm.
They told of the battles in days gone by,
Till it made my young blood thrill;
The leg was lost in the Wilderness fight,
And the arm on Malvern Hill.
“They sat on the stone by the farm-yard gate,
And talked for an hour or more,
Till their eyes grew bright and their hearts seemed warm
With fighting their battles o’er;
And they parted at last with a friendly grasp,
In a kindly, brotherly way,
Each calling on God to speed the time
Uniting the blue and the gray.”
Then the mother thought of other days,—
Two stalwart boys from her riven;
How they knelt at her side and lispingly prayed,
“Our Father which art in heaven;”
How one wore the gray and the other the blue;
How they passed away from sight,
And had gone to the land where gray and blue
Are merged in colors of light.
And she answered her darling with golden hair,
While her heart was sadly wrung
With the thoughts awakened in that sad hour
By her innocent prattling tongue:
“The blue and the gray are the colors of God,
They are seen in the sky at even,
And many a noble, gallant soul
Has found them a passport to heaven.”
The Blue and the Gray (Anonymous)
Each thin hand resting on a grave,
Her lips apart in prayer,
A mother knelt, and left her tears
Upon the violets there.
O’er many a rood of vale and lawn,
Of hill and forest gloom,
The reaper Death had revelled in
His fearful harvest home.
The last unquiet summer shone
Upon a fruitless fray;
From yonder forest charged the blue—
Down yonder slope the gray.
The hush of death was on the scene,
And sunset o’er the dead,
In that oppressive stillness,
A pall of glory spread.
I know not, dare not question how
I met the ghastly glare
Of each upturned and stirless face
That shrunk and whitened there.
I knew my noble boys had stood
Through all that withering day,
I knew that Willie wore the blue,
That Harry wore the gray.
I thought of Willie’s clear blue eye,
His wavy hair of gold,
That clustered on a fearless brow
Of purest Saxon mould;
Of Harry, with his raven locks
And eagle glance of pride;
Of how they clasped each other’s hand
And left their mother’s side;
How hand in hand they bore my prayers
And blessings on the way—
A noble heart beneath the blue,
Another ’neath the gray.
The dead, with white and folded hands,
That hushed our village homes,
I’ve seen laid calmly, tenderly,
Within their darkened rooms;
But there I saw distorted limbs,
And many an eye aglare,
In the soft purple twilight of
The thunder-smitten air.
Along the slope and on the sward
In ghastly ranks they lay,
And there was blood upon the blue
And blood upon the gray.
I looked and saw his blood, and his;
A swift and vivid dream
Of blended years flashed o’er me, when,
Like some cold shadow, came
A blindness of the eye and brain—
The same that seizes one
When men are smitten suddenly
Who overstare the sun;
And while, blurred with the sudden stroke
That swept my soul, I lay,
They buried Willie in his blue,
And Harry in his gray.
The shadows fall upon their graves;
They fall upon my heart;
And through the twilight of this soul
Like dews the tears will start;
The starlight comes so silently
And lingers where they rest;
So hope’s revealing starlight sinks
And shines within my breast.
They ask not there, where yonder heaven
Smiles with eternal day,
Why Willie wore the loyal blue,
Why Harry wore the gray.
WILLIAM WESCOTT FINK
(1844–?)
I ATTACH FINK’S name to this narrative poem only because it is so credited in The Speaker’s Garland 7, no. 27 (1888). The poem is said to have appeared in the New York Independent, but no date is given. In most later anthologies the ballad is without a byline. All I could learn about Fink is that he published at least two books of poems: Valley Forge (1870) and Echoes from Erin (1903).
Leadville, in central Colorado about 170 miles southwest of Denver, was one of the most celebrated and turbulent mining camps in America. It experienced both gold and silver booms. Horace Austin Warner Tabor (1820–1899), known as “Silver Dollar Tabor,” was the most famous of those prospectors who made and lost huge fortunes mining silver in Leadville. After he died, his second wife Elizabeth (“Baby Doe”) Tabor, a notorious hooker, lived penniless near her husband’s Matchless (but then worthless) Mine until she died of exposure in 1935. Someone should write a ballad called “Leadville Liz.”
Leadville Jim
He came to town one winter day;
He had walked from Leadville all the way;
He went to work in a lumber yard,
And wrote a letter that ran: “Dear Pard,
Stick to the claim, whatever you do,
And remember that Jim will see you through.”
For, to quote his partner, “they owned a lead
Mid der shplendidest brospects, und nodings to ead.”
When Sunday came he brushed his coat,
And tied a handkerchief round his throat,
Though his feet in hob-nailed shoes were shod,
He ventured to enter the house of God.
When, sharply scanning his ill-clad feet,
The usher gave him the rearmost seat.
By chance the loveliest girl in town
Came late to the house of God that day,
And, scorning to make a vain display
Of her brand new, beautiful Sunday gown,
Beside the threadbare man sat down.
When the organ pealed she turned to Jim,
And kindly offered her book to him,
Held half herself, and showed him the place,
And then, with genuine Christian grace,
She sang soprano, and he sang bass,
While up in the choir the basso growled,
The tenor, soprano, and alto howled,
And the banker’s son looked back and scowled.
The preacher closed his sermon grand
With an invitation to “join the band.”
Then quietly from his seat uprose
The miner, dressed in his threadbare clothes,
And over the carpeted floor walked down,
The aisle of the richest church in town.
In spite of the general shudder and frown,
He joined the church and went his way;
But he did not know he had walked that day
O’er the sensitive corns of pride, rough-shod;
For the miner was thinking just then of God.
A little lonely it seemed to him
In the rearmost pew when Sunday came;
One deacon had dubbed him “Leadville Jim,”
But the rest had forgotten quite his name.
And yet ’twas never more strange than true,
God sat with the man in the rearmost pew,
Strengthened his arm in the lumber yard,
And away in the mountains helped his “Pard.”
But after awhile a letter came
Which ran: “Dear Yim—I haf sell our claim,
Und I send you a jeck for half der same.
A million, I dought, was a pooty good brice,
Und my heart said to sell, so I took its advice—
You know what I mean if you lofe a fraulein—
Good-bye. I am going to marry Katrine.”
The hob-nailed shoes and rusty coat
Were laid aside, and another note
Came rippling out of the public throat,
The miner was now no longer “Jim,”
But the deacons “Brothered” and “Mistered” him;
Took their buggies and showed him round.
And, more than the fact of his wealth, they found
Through the papers which told the wondrous tale,
That the fellow had led his class at Yale.
Ah! the maidens admired his splendid shape,
Which the tailor had matched with careful tape;
But he married the loveliest girl in town,
The one who once by his side sat down,
When up in the choir the basso growled,
Then tenor, soprano, and alto howled,
And the banker’s son looked back and scowled.
HARRIET A. GLAZEBROOK
(?-?)
ALL I KNOW about Glazebrook is that she was a British temperance leader who wrote anti-booze verse and edited collections with such titles as Readings and Recitations, Chiefly upon Temperance (London, 1874) and Readings in Rhyme from the Drama of Drink (London, 1876) .
Glazebrook did not invent the ringing declaration “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.” This was adapted from an earlier poem by one George W. Young, about whom I also know nothing. His poem seems to have been first published as a broadside about 1870. The version given here is from The Speaker’s Garland 4, no. 16 (1878). Both poems were popular recitations at temperance meetings in the United States and in England.
Today it is easy to ridicule the temperance movement, when leaders smashed saloon windows with axes, and to forget that it arose when liquor was the scourge of the land. More people died then from alcoholism than they do today from smoking. There is a strong parallel between the two addi
ctions. Restaurants in pre-prohibition days took pride in being alcohol-free just as an increasing number now take pride in being smoke-free. Both men and women today are saying, “Lips that touch tobacco shall never touch mine.”
Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine
Alice Lee stood awaiting her lover one night,
Her cheeks flushed and glowing, her eyes full of light.
She had placed a sweet rose ‘mid her wild flowing hair;
No flower of the forest e’er looked half so fair
As she did that night, as she stood by the door
Of the cot where she dwelt by the side of the moor.
She heard a quick step coming over the moor,
And a merry voice which she had oft heard before;
And ere she could speak a strong arm held her fast,
And a manly voice whispered, “I’ve come, love, at last.
I’m sorry that I’ve kept you waiting like this,
But I know you’ll forgive me, then give me a kiss.”
But she shook the bright curls on her beautiful head,
And she drew herself up while quite proudly she said,
“Now, William, I’ll prove if you really are true,
For you say that you love me—I don’t think you do;
If really you love me you must give up the wine,
For the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.”
He looked quite amazed. “Why, Alice, ’tis clear
You really are getting quite jealous, my dear.”
“In that you are right,” she replied; “for, you see,
You’ll soon love the liquor far better than me.
I’m jealous, I own, of the poisonous wine,
For the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.”