And under the chin the bail,—
I believe they called the thing a helm;
And the lid they carried they called a shield;
And, thus accoutred, they took the field,
Sallying forth to overwhelm
The dragons and pagans that plagued the realm:—
So this modern knight
Prepared for flight,
Put on his wings and strapped them tight;
Jointed and jaunty, strong and light;
Buckled them fast to shoulder and hip,—
Ten feet they measured from tip to tip!
And a helm had he, but that he wore,
Not on his head like those of yore,
But more like the helm of a ship.
“Hush!” Reuben said,
“He ’s up in the shed!
He ’s opened the winder,—I see his head!
He stretches it out,
An’ pokes it about,
Lookin’ to see ’f the coast is clear,
An’ nobody near;—
Guess he don’o’ who ’s hid in here!
He ’s riggin’ a spring-board over the sill!
Stop laffin’, Solomon! Burke, keep still!
He ’s a climbin’ out now—Of all the things!
What ’s he got on? I van, it ’s wings!
An’ t’ other thing? I vum, it ’s a tail!
An’ there he sets like a hawk on a rail!
Steppin’ careful, he travels the length
Of his spring-board, and teeters to try its strength.
Now he stretches his wings, like a monstrous bat;
Peeks over his shoulder, this way an’ that,
Fer to see ’f the’ ’s any one passin’ by;
But the’ ’s on’y a ca’f an’ a goslin’ nigh.
They turn up at him a wonderin’ eye,
To see—The dragon! he ’s goin’ to fly!
Away he goes! Jimminy! what a jump!
Flop—flop—an’ plump
To the ground with a thump!
Flutt’rin’ an’ flound’rin’, all ’n a lump!”
As a demon is hurled by an angel’s spear,
Heels over head, to his proper sphere,—
Heels over head, and head over heels,
Dizzily down the abyss he wheels,—
So fell Darius. Upon his crown,
In the midst of the barnyard, he came down,
In a wonderful whirl of tangled strings,
Broken braces and broken springs,
Broken tail and broken wings,
Shooting-stars, and various things!
Away with a bellow fled the calf,
And what was that? Did the gosling laugh?
’T is a merry roar
From the old barn-door,
And he hears the voice of Jotham crying,
“Say, D’rius! how de yeou like flyin’?”
Slowly, ruefully, where he lay,
Darius just turned and looked that way,
As he stanched his sorrowful nose with his cuff.
“Wal, I like flyin’ well enough,”
He said; “but the’ ain’t sich a thunderin’ sight
O’ fun in ’t when ye come to light.”
MORAL.
I just have room for the moral here:
And this is the moral,—Stick to your sphere.
Or if you insist, as you have the right,
On spreading your wings for a loftier flight,
The moral is,—Take care how you light.
HENRY VAN DYKE
(1852—1933)
Now ALMOST FORGOTTEN, the Reverend Van Dyke was one of the most widely read American authors of the century’s first three decades. His some fifty books include novels, short stories, essays, travel sketches, sermons, literary criticism (he edited a six-volume Little Masterpieces of English Poetry) and verse. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania and later ordained a Presbyterian minister, for many years he pastored the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. For twenty-three years he taught English literature at Princeton, his alma mater.
Van Dyke is best known today for his Christmas novella The Story of the Other Wise Man (1896). He was so opposed to Germany during the First World War that he resigned as United States diplomatic minister to the Netherlands (1913-1917) to protest that nation’s neutrality.
“America for Me,” under the title of “An American in Europe,” made its first book appearance in Van Dyke’s The White Bees and Other Poems (1909). C. Austin Miles set it to music, which was published by Hall-Mack, Philadelphia.
The sixth edition of Granger’s Index to Poetry ( 1973) lists seventy-two poems by Van Dyke. Judging from the number of anthologies in which it appeared, “America for Me” has been the most popular. Among his many religious poems, I have selected, “If All the Skies,” Van Dyke’s effort to explain the mystery of evil, because it turns up in so many collections of Christian verse.
America for Me
’Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.
So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.
I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!
I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,—
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.
Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
If All the Skies
If all the skies were sunshine,
Our faces would be fain
To feel once more upon them
The cooling plash of rain.
If all the world were music,
Our hearts would often long
For one sweet strain of silence,
To break the endless song.
If life were always merry,
Our souls would seek relief,
And rest from weary laughter
In the quiet arms of grief.
WILLIAM ROSS WALLACE
(1819—1881)
WALLACE WAS A Kentucky-born attorney who lived in New York City, where he became a good friend of Edgar Allan Poe. His books of verse include Alban the Pirate (a long narrative poem, 1848), Meditations on America and Other Poems (1851) and The Liberty Bell (1862). The latter contains patriotic poems defending the Union, many of which were set to music.
Wallace is remembered today only for the last two lines of each stanza in the following poem, originally titled “What Rules the World.”
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
Blessings on the hand of woman!
Angels guard its strength and grace,
In the palace, cottage, hovel—
Oh, no matter where the place!
Would that never storms assail
ed it,
Rainbows ever round it curled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rocks the world.
Infancy’s the tender fountain;
Power may with beauty flow;
Mother’s first to guide the streamlets;
From them souls unresting grow—
Grow on for the good or evil,
Sunshine streamed or darkness hurled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rocks the world.
Woman, how divine your mission
Here upon our natal sod!
Keep, oh keep the young heart open
Always to the breath of God!
All true trophies of the ages
Are from mother-love impearled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rocks the world.
Blessings on the hand of woman!
Fathers, sons and daughters cry;
And the sacred song is mingled
With the worship in the sky—
Mingles where no tempest darkens,
Rainbows evermore are hurled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rocks the world.
JOHN WHITAKER WATSON
(1824—1890)
HUNDREDS OF sentimental poems have been written about the tragic deaths of prostitutes—Thomas Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” was England’s outstanding example—but no poem on this theme by an American was more recited by “speakers,” or more reproduced in nineteenth-century anthologies, than “Beautiful Snow.”
The poem was first published in Harper’s Weekly, November 27, 1858, without a byline. Like so many other anonymous poems that become instant hits, a vigorous controversy arose over who wrote it. As Burton Stevenson relates in Famous Single Poems, no less than seven different persons falsely claimed to be its author. “Probably no other poem in American literature,” Stevenson comments, “has been so fought over.”
There is not the slightest doubt that John Watson wrote the poem, though it was not until his book Beautiful Snow and Other Poems appeared in 1869 that his name was officially joined to the poem. The book was first published in 1869 by Turner Brothers, in Philadelphia. An enlarged second edition (1871), printed by T. B. Peterson, another Philadelphia firm, featured illustrations by Edward L. Henry. More than twenty-five rave reviews were quoted in an appendix to later editions.
A graduate of Columbia University, Watson studied medicine for a time, then abandoned it to become a New York City writer of pathetic verse and romantic fiction for the city’s periodicals. He could never understand why only his snow poem became so famous when he had written others that he considered “as good or better.” Having read all the poems in his book, I agree with Stevenson that they are a “dreary waste.” Next to “Beautiful Snow,” his most admired poems were “The Dying Soldier” and “The Patter of Little Feet.”
I own a copy of an undated London collection titled The Thousand Best Poems in the World, selected by E. W. Cole. “Beautiful Snow” is there credited to Major William Andrew H. Sigourney, who published it as his own in Galaxy Magazine (July 1869). Here is how the poem’s origin is described:
In 1850, W. A. Sigourney, a nephew of the late Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, married a wealthy and accomplished young lady in New York City. They soon after went to Europe, where they remained two years, and where she yielded to the tempter and lost her purity and fidelity. On her return home her parents discarded her, and, being shunned and disgraced, she plunged headlong into vice and dissipation. Her husband, as charitable and kind as he was devoted, tried every means to reclaim her to duty, without avail. She sank deeper and deeper in vice, until she was arrested as a common outcast, and sent to the work-house. Being liberated by a well known magistrate, she promised to reform, and for a short time lived with her husband; but in the autumn of 1853 she returned to her old haunts, began to drink to excess, and thus continued until one stormy night of December, when she died in White Street, and was found in the morning nearly covered with snow. She was buried by her husband in Greenwood.
Sigourney’s version plagiarizes all the stanzas of Watson’s original, adding six absurd new stanzas to the beginning, one in the middle and two more at the end. For years Sigourney earned a dishonest living by reciting the poem at country fairs.
Sigourney was “the most wonderful of all these claimants,” Watson told the New York World in 1884, “and the one who gave me the most serious annoy ance.” The conflict between the two men was discussed in The Phrenological Journal (Vol. 50, June 1870, pages 429-30) by an editor who did not take sides. Poems by Sigourney had been published previously in this magazine. The editor wrote that the controversy had been revived by a newspaper report that Sigourney had shot himself and was buried in Greenwood. According to Watson, this was a false story written by Sigourney himself to avoid “arrest for some rascality.”
Merle Johnson, in You Know These Lines!, quotes from a slip that was tipped into the first edition of Beautiful Snow and Other Poems:
Watson and several of his friends were sitting around the table of a Broadway saloon one snowy day, when a poor, half-clad woman entered and, approaching the party, asked for assistance, at the same time remarking, “Gentlemen, there is nothing pure about me except the snow.” Watson immediately conceived the idea of the beautiful and touching production which has appealed to thousands of hearts.
I am told that many responses were written to Watson’s poem. Included here is one I found in The Speaker’s Garland 1, no. 2 (1872), Choice Selections. All I could learn about the author, Sallie J. Hancock, was that she was a Kentucky poet and novelist, with one book of verse titled Rayon d ’Amour (1869).
So many parodies of “Beautiful Snow” were written that an anonymous writer wrote a parody about the parodies:
Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow
(This is a parody, please, you know;
Over and over again you may meet
Parodies writ on this poem so sweet;
Rhyming, chiming, skipping along,
Comical bards think they do nothing wrong;
Striving to follow what others have done,
One to the number may keep up the fun).
Beautiful snow, so gently you scud,
Pure for a minute, then dirty as mud!
Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow!
Here ’s a fine mess you have left us below;
Chilling our feet to the tips of our toes;
Cheekily landing full pert on our nose;
Jinking, slinking, ever you try
’Neath our umbrella to flop in our eye;
Gamins await us at every new street,
Watching us carefully, guiding our feet,
Joking, mocking, ready to throw
A hard-compressed ball of this beautiful snow.
When Watson’s poem was first published it had a final stanza which he wisely omitted from its book version:
Helpless and frail as the trampled-on snow,
Sinner, despair not—Christ stoopeth low
To rescue the soul that is lost in its sin,
And raise it to life and enjoyment again.
Groaning,
Bleeding,
Dying for thee,
The Crucified hung on the accursed tree.
His accents of mercy fall soft on my ear;
Is there mercy for me, will he heed my weak prayer?
O God, in the stream that for sinners doth flow,
Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Beautiful Snow
Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below;
Over the house-tops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet;
Dancing,
Flirting,
Skimming along.
Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong.
Flying to kiss a
fair lady’s cheek;
Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak.
Beautiful snow, from the heavens above,
Pure as an angel and fickle as love!
Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow!
How the flakes gather and laugh as they go!
Whirling about in its maddening fun,
It plays in its glee with every one.
Chasing,
Laughing,
Hurrying by,
It lights up the face and it sparkles the eye;
And even the dogs, with a bark and a bound,
Snap at the crystals that eddy around.
The town is alive, and its heart in a glow
To welcome the coming of beautiful snow.
How the wild crowd goes swaying along,
Hailing each other with humor and song!
How the gay sledges like meteors flash by—
Bright for a moment, then lost to the eye.
Ringing,
Swinging,
Dashing they go
Over the crest of the beautiful snow:
Snow so pure when it falls from the sky,
To be trampled in mud by the crowd rushing by;
To be trampled and tracked by the thousands of feet
Till it blends with the horrible filth in the street.
Once I was pure as the snow—but I fell:
Fell, like the snow-flakes, from heaven—to hell:
Fell, to be tramped as the filth of the street:
Fell, to be scoffed, to be spit on and beat.
Pleading,
Cursing,
Dreading to die,
Selling my soul to whoever would buy,
Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread,
Hating the living and fearing the dead.
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 19