That was the best place, after all!—
The talks on the back porch, in the low
Slanting sun and the evening glow,
With the voice of counsel that touched us so,
Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.
And then, in the garden—near the side
Where the beehives were and the path was wide,—
The apple-house—like a fairy cell—
With the little square door we knew so well,
And the wealth inside but our tongues could tell—
Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.
And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom
Of the willow trees,—and the cooler room
Where the swinging shelves and the crocks were kept,
Where the cream in a golden languor slept,
While the waters gurgled and laughed and wept—
Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.
And as many a time have you and I—
Barefoot boys in the days gone by—
Knelt, and in tremulous ecstasies
Dipped our lips into sweets like these,—
Memory now is on her knees
Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.—
For, O my brother so far away,
This is to tell you—she waits to-day
To welcome us:—Aunt Mary fell
Asleep this morning, whispering, “Tell
The boys to come.” . . . And all is well
Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.
EPES SARGENT
(1813–1880)
AFTER SERVING on the staff of several Boston papers, Sargent moved to Manhattan where he also worked for newspapers and edited his own short-lived Sargent’s New Monthly Magazine. Back in Boston, he became editor of the Transcript before retiring to write romantic novels, plays, popular school textbooks and spellers, and to edit “speakers.” He also edited a six-volume edition of the poems of Thomas Hood.
Sargent’s most admired poem—it was set to music by Henry Russell—was “A Life on the Ocean Wave.” It ran first in the New York Mirror (May 19,1838) under the pseudonym of “Zeta,” and was included in Songs of the Sea (1847), one of Sargent’s many books of verse.
In his elderly years Sargent became one of the nation’s most gullible Spiritualists, wasting his talents on such now forgotten works as Planchette, the Despair of Science; The Proof Palpable of Immortality; and The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism.
A Life on the Ocean Wave
A life on the ocean wave,
A home on the rolling deep,
Where the scattered waters rave,
And the winds their revels keep!
Like an eagle caged, I pine
On this dull, unchanging shore:
Oh! give me the flashing brine,
The spray and the tempest’s roar!
Once more on the deck I stand
Of my own swift-gliding craft:
Set sail! farewell to the land!
The gale follows fair abaft.
We shoot through the sparkling foam
Like an ocean-bird set free;—
Like the ocean-bird, our home
We’ll find far out on the sea.
The land is no longer in view,
The clouds have begun to frown;
But with a stout vessel and crew,
We’ll say, Let the storm come down!
And the song of our hearts shall be,
While the winds and the waters rave,
A home on the rolling sea!
A life on the ocean wave!
JOHN GODFREY SAXE
(1816–1887)
SAXE WAS ONE of the most prolific and most admired poets of the nineteenth century. He is best remembered today for his verse about the blind men who examine an elephant, reprinted in my Best Remembered Poems.
Our forebears also chuckled over “The Puzzled Census-Taker,” which appeared in scores of early anthologies. “Rhyme of the Rail” is perhaps the most admired poem ever written about the pleasures of train travel. Ironically, as I mentioned in Best Remembered Poems, Saxe never fully recovered from a severe injury suffered in a train wreck.
The Puzzled Census-Taker
“Got any boys?” the marshal said
To a lady from over the Rhine;
And the lady shook her flaxen head,
And civilly answered, “Nein!”
“Got any girls?” the marshal said
To the lady from over the Rhine;
And again the lady shook her head,
And civilly answered, “Nein!”
“But some are dead?” the marshal said
To the lady from over the Rhine;
And again the lady shook her head,
And civilly answered, “Nein!”
“Husband, of course,” the marshal said
To the lady from over the Rhine;
And again she shook her flaxen head,
And civilly answered, “Nein!”
“The devil you have!” the marshal said
To the lady from over the Rhine;
And again she shook her flaxen head,
And civilly answered, “Nein!”
“Now, what do you mean by shaking your head,
And always answering ‘Nine?’ ”
“Ich kann nicht Englisch!” civilly said
The lady from over the Rhine.
Rhyme of the Rail
Singing through the forests,
Rattling over ridges,
Shooting under arches,
Rumbling over bridges,
Whizzing through the mountains,
Buzzing o’er the vale,—
Bless me! this is pleasant,
Riding on the Rail!
Men of different “stations”
In the eye of Fame
Here are very quickly
Coming to the same.
High and lowly people,
Birds of every feather,
On a common level
Traveling together!
Gentleman in shorts,
Looming very tall;
Gentleman at large,
Talking very small;
Gentleman in tights,
With a loose-ish mien;
Gentleman in gray,
Looking rather green.
Gentleman quite old,
Asking for the news;
Gentleman in black,
In a fit of blues;
Gentleman in claret,
Sober as a vicar;
Gentleman in Tweed,
Dreadfully in liquor!
Stranger on the right,
Looking very sunny,
Obviously reading
Something rather funny.
Now the smiles are thicker,
Wonder what they mean?
Faith he ’s got the KNICKER-
BOCKER Magazine!
Stranger on the left,
Closing up his peepers;
Now he snores amain,
Like the Seven Sleepers;
At his feet a volume
Gives the explanation,
How the man grew stupid
From “Association”!
Ancient maiden lady
Anxiously remarks,
That there must be peril
’Mong so many sparks!
Roguish-looking fellow,
Turning to the stranger,
Says it’s his opinion
She is out of danger!
Woman with her baby,
Sitting vis à-vis;
Baby keeps a squalling;
Woman looks at me;
Asks about the distance,
Says it ’s tiresome talking,
Noises of the cars
Are so very shocking!
Market-woman careful
Of the precious casket,
Knowing eggs are eggs,
Tightly holds her basket;
Feeling that a smash,
If it came, would surely
Send her eggs to pot
Rather prematurely!
Singing through the forests,
Rattling over ridges,
Shooting under arches,
Rumbling over bridges,
Whizzing through the mountains,
Buzzing o’er the vale,—
Bless me! this is pleasant,
Riding on the Rail!
ROBERT SERVICE
(1874—1958)
SERVICE’S TWO MOST famous poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” are included in Best Remembered Poems, which also includes information on Service’s life.
“The Spell of the Yukon” was another of his earliest and most admired poems. It appeared in his first book of verse, Songs of a Sourdough, published in England in 1907, and in the U.S. that same year as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. The popularity of his poetry has never waned.
The Spell of the Yukon
I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.
No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.
You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
The summer—no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.
The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.
They’re making my money diminish;
I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
So me for the Yukon once more.
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
EDWARD ROWLAND SILL
(1841—1887)
SILL WAS BORN in Windsor, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale. Harvard’s Divinity School turned him into a lifelong agnostic. He was a professor of English literature at the University of California from 1874 to 1882.
Books of poems by Sill are The Heritage and Other Poems (1868), Venus of Milo and Other Poems (1883) and two posthumous works, Hermione and Other Poems (1889) and Poems of Edward Rowland Sill (1902). Many of his poems were contributed to magazines under the name of Andrew Hedbrooke.
Sill was an intimate friend of the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce. In The Spirit of Modern Philosophy Royce quotes “The Fool’s Prayer” in its entirety, on which he comments:
As I knew him, the poet of these verses was peculiarly sensitive to the presence in the world of that willfulness both of fortune and of our fellows, which not because of conscious sinfulness, nor yet because of any obviously necessary discord of motives, but because of mere brute accident or stupidity, tears to pieces whatever is spiritual, kills our infant children, leaves our unrecognized heroes to die neglected and ineffective, sunders the wounded hearts of faithful lovers, makes brother war with brother, plunges society into bitter confusions, defeats over and over the most sacred ideals.
Included here are the only two of Sill’s poems that survive in anthologies. I have no idea where they were first published.
The Fool’s Prayer
The royal feast was done; the King
Sought some new sport to banish care,
And to his jester cried: “Sir Fool,
Kneel now, and make for us a prayer!”
The jester doffed his cap and bells,
And stood the mocking court before;
They could not see the bitter smile
Behind the painted grin he wore.
He bowed his head, and bent his knee
Upon the monarch’s silken stool;
His pleading voice arose: “O Lord,
Be merciful to me, a fool!
“No pity, Lord, could change the heart
From red with wrong to white as wool;
The rod must heal the sin: but, Lord,
Be merciful to me, a fool!
“ ’Tis not by guilt the onward sweep
Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay;
’Tis by our follies that so long
We hold the earth from heaven away.
“These clumsy feet, still in the mire,
Go crushing blossoms without end;
These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust
Among the heart-strings of a friend.
“The ill-timed truth we might have kept—
Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung?
The word we had not sense to say—
Who knows how grandly it had rung?
“Our faults no tenderness should ask,
The chastening stripes must cleanse them all;
But for our blunders—oh, in shame
Before the eyes of heaven we fall.
“Earth bears no balsam for mistakes;
Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool
That did his will; but Thou, O Lord,
Be merciful to me, a fool!”
The room was hushed; in silence ros
e
The King, and sought his gardens cool,
And walked apart, and murmured low,
“Be merciful to me, a fool!”
Opportunity
This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:—
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle’s edge,
And thought, “Had I a sword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king’s son bears—but this
Blunt thing! ”—he snapped and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.
ARABELLA EUGENIE SMITH
(1844-1916)
BELLE SMITH, as she liked to be called, is another of Burton Stevenson’s “one-poem poets.” “If I Should Die To-night” not only is her only published poem, but so far as anyone knows, she never wrote another. Born in Litchfield, Ohio, she was taken by her parents to Iowa, where she taught in public schools. Later she was a librarian and instructor at her alma mater, Tabor College, in Hillsboro, Kansas. She became librarian of the Newton, Iowa, public library. Little else is known about her.
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 16