He turned, then, quite angry. “Confound it!” he said,
“What nonsense you’ve got in your dear little head;
But I’ll see if I cannot remove it from hence.”
She said, “‘Tis not nonsense, ’tis plain common-sense:
And I mean what I say, and this you will find,
I don’t often change when I’ve made up my mind.”
He stood all irresolute, angry, perplexed:
She never before saw him look half so vexed;
But she said, “If he talks all his life I won’t flinch”;
And he talked, but he never could move her an inch.
He then bitterly cried, with a look and a groan,
“O Alice, your heart is as hard as a stone.”
But though her heart beat in his favour quite loud,
She still firmly kept to the vow she had vowed;
And at last, without even a tear or a sigh,
She said, “I am going, so, William, goodbye.”
“Nay, stay,” he then said, “I’ll choose one of the two—
I’ll give up the liquor in favour of you.”
Now, William had often great cause to rejoice
For the hour he had made sweet Alice his choice;
And he blessed through the whole of a long, useful life,
The fate that had given him his dear little wife.
And she, by her firmness, won to us that night
One who in our cause is an ornament bright.
Oh! that each fair girl in our abstinence band
Would say: “I’ll ne’er give my heart or my hand
Unto one who I ever had reason to think
Would taste one small drop of the vile, cursed drink”;
But say, when you are wooed, “I’m a foe to the wine,
And the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.”
Lips That Touch Liquor Must Never Touch Mine (by George W. Young)
You are coming to woo me, but not as of yore,
When I hastened to welcome your ring at the door;
For I trusted that he who stood waiting me then,
Was the brightest, the truest, the noblest of men.
Your lips, on my own when they printed “Farewell,”
Had never been soiled by “the beverage of hell;”
But they come to me now with the bacchanal sign,
And the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine.
I think of that night in the garden alone,
When in whispers you told me your heart was my own,
That your love in the future should faithfully be
Unshared by another, kept only for me.
Oh, sweet to my soul is the memory still,
Of the lips which met mine, when they murmured “I will;”
But now to their pressure no more they incline,
For the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine!
O John! how it crushed me, when first in your face
The pen of the “Rum Fiend” had written “disgrace;”
And turned me in silence and tears from that breath
All poisoned and foul from the chalice of death.
It scattered the hopes I had treasured to last;
It darkened the future and clouded the past;
It shattered my idol, and ruined the shrine,
For the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine.
I loved you—Oh, dearer than language can tell,
And you saw it, you proved it, you knew it too well!
But the man of my love was far other than he
Who now from the “Tap-room” comes reeling to me:
In manhood and honor so noble and right—
His heart was so true, and his genius so bright—
And his soul was unstained, unpolluted by wine;
But the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine.
You promised reform, but I trusted in vain;
Your pledge was but made to be broken again:
And the lover so false to his promises now,
Will not, as a husband, be true to his vow.
The word must be spoken that bids you depart—
Though the effort to speak it should shatter my heart—
Though in silence, with blighted affection, I pine,
Yet the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine!
If one spark, in your bosom, of virtue remain,
Go fan it with prayer till it kindle again;
Resolved, with “God helping,” in future to be
From wine and its follies unshackled and free!
And when you have conquered this foe of your soul,—
In manhood and honor beyond his control—
This heart will again beat responsive to thine,
And the lips free from liquor be welcome to mine.
HOMER GREENE
(1853–1940)
HOMER GREENE is another splendid specimen of what Burton Stevenson, in Famous Single Poems, calls a “one-poem poet.” According to an entry in Who Was Who, he was a Honesdale, Pennsylvania lawyer—director of a local bank and a cemetery, and active in state politics. He wrote at least fifteen books of prose, and one book of verse, What My Lover Said (1931).
The title poem is the only one worth remembering. It first appeared in the New York Evening Post (November 19,1875). An editor changed the title from “What Her Lover Said,” and gave it the byline of H. G. As the poem got reprinted here and there, and recited by professional “speakers,” some editor decided that H. G. stood for Horace Greeley, who died in 1872! In vain Greene tried to quash the mistake. On December 8, 1880, the Evening Post published a long letter in which Greene said he wrote the poem when he was a student at Union College.
In 1886, another name was put forward as that of the poem’s author, Colonel Richard Realf. Realf had killed himself in 1879, but his friends insisted in letters to the Philadelphia News that he was the poem’s true author.
The most annoying claimant was Mrs. O. C. Jones, a wealthy woman in Abbeville, Louisiana, who informed the New York Sun that she had penned the poem about a Confederate soldier with whom she had a torrid romance. Greene offered his home in Honesdale to anyone who could prove the poem was published before 1875, but Mrs. Jones refused to give in. In more letters to the Sun she insisted it was a Union soldier with whom she had flirted, and to whom she gave a copy of her poem. She could not remember his name, but surely it was he who passed the gem on to the Evening Post.
Mrs. Jones then made a fatal mistake. To prove she wrote the poem she offered a sequel, titled “A Twilight Dream.” It was so awful that the Sun finally stopped defending her. As Stevenson puts it, “she slipped into . . . peaceful obscurity.”
What My Lover Said
By the merest chance, in the twilight gloom,
In the orchard path he met me;
In the tall, wet grass, with its faint perfume,
And I tried to pass, but he made no room,
Oh, I tried, but he would not let me.
So I stood and blushed till the grass grew red,
With my face bent down above it,
While he took my hand as he whispering said—
(How the clover lifted each pink, sweet head,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the clover in bloom, I love it!)
In the high, wet grass went the path to hide,
And the low, wet leaves hung over;
But I could not pass upon either side,
For I found myself, when I vainly tried,
In the arms of my steadfast lover.
And he held me there and he raised my head,
While he closed the path before me,
And he looked down into my eyes and said—
(How the leaves bent down from the boughs o’er head,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the leaves hanging lowly o’er me!)
Had he moved a
side but a little way,
I could surely then have passed him;
And he knew I never could wish to stay,
And would not have heard what he had to say,
Could I only aside have cast him.
It was almost dark, and the moments sped,
And the searching night wind found us,
But he drew me nearer and softly said—
(How the pure, sweet wind grew still, instead,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the whispering wind around us!)
I am sure that he knew when he held me fast,
That I must be all unwilling;
For I tried to go, and I would have passed,
As the night was come with its dew, at last,
And the sky with its stars was filling.
But he clasped me close when I would have fled,
And he made me hear his story,
And his soul came out from his lips and said—
(How the stars crept out where the white moon led,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the moon and the stars in glory!)
I know that the grass and the leaves will not tell,
And I’m sure that the wind, precious rover,
Will carry my secret so safely and well
That no being shall ever discover
One word of the many that rapidly fell
From the soul-speaking lips of my lover;
And the moon and the stars that looked over
Shall never reveal what a fairy-like spell
They wove round about us that night in the dell,
In the path through the dew-laden clover,
Nor echo the whispers that made my heart swell
As they fell from the lips of my lover.
BRET HARTE
(1839–1902)
FRANCIS BRET HARTE was born in Albany, New York. After a series of jobs in California, including gold mining and printing, he settled in San Francisco to become a popular writer of novels, short stories, poems and amusing parodies. One of his parodies was a mystery story involving Hemlock Jones. Of his two failed plays, Ah Sin was written with Mark Twain. In later years he lived in several eastern cities, and finally in London. He wrote more than forty books, and his Collected Writings (1904) fill nineteen volumes.
Harte’s poem about the Chinese card hustler, usually titled “The Heathen Chinee,” first appeared in the Overland Monthly (September 1870), while Harte was editor. It was reprinted the following year by Western News, of Chicago, on a set of nine cards illustrated by Joseph Hall. It was also published that year as a pamphlet, with pictures by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and included in a cloth-bound volume, Poems by Bret Harte. The poem was set to music by at least two composers, Charles Towner and F. Boott. It is surely the most famous poem ever written about euchre. In this card game a “bower” is one of the two highest cards unless a joker is used, in which case it is the second or third highest. The “bowers” are the jack of trumps, called the “right bower,” and the jack of the same color, called the “left bower.” The wax on Ah Sin’s fingernails was secretly used for marking cards. Harte wrote the poem during America’s obsession with the “Yellow Peril,” a fear of China intensified by the flood of Chinese laborers who worked for low pay on the railroads that opened up the west. The phrase “the heathen Chinee is peculiar” was bandied about the country for many years.
I found an anonymous reply to Truthful James, spoken by Ah Sin, in The Speaker’s Garland 1, no. 4 (1872), Choice Selections, and have included it here.
“Her Letter” and “His Answer” first appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1870. “Her Last Letter,” rounding out the romance, was written much later. In 1905 Houghton Mifflin posthumously published the trilogy in a book handsomely illustrated with more than 45 plates, some in full color, by Arthur I. Keller.
Plain Language from Truthful James
Which I wish to remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,
Which the same I would rise to explain.
Ah Sin was his name;
And I shall not deny,
In regard to the same,
What that name might imply;
But his smile it was pensive and childlike,
As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.
It was August the third,
And quite soft was the skies;
Which it might be inferred
That Ah Sin was likewise;
Yet he played it that day upon William
And me in a way I despise.
Which we had a small game,
And Ah Sin took a hand:
It was Euchre. The same
He did not understand;
But he smiled as he sat by the table,
With the smile that was childlike and bland.
Yet the cards they were stocked
In a way that I grieve,
And my feelings were shocked
At the state of Nye’s sleeve,
Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers,
And the same with intent to deceive.
But the hands that were played
By that heathen Chinee,
And the points that he made,
Were quite frightful to see,—
Till at last he put down a right bower,
Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.
Then I looked up at Nye,
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,
And said, “Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,”—
And he went for that heathen Chinee.
In the scene that ensued
I did not take a hand,
But the floor it was strewed
Like the leaves on the strand
With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding,
In the game “he did not understand.”
In his sleeves, which were long,
He had twenty-four jacks,—
Which was coming it strong,
Yet I state but the facts;
And we found on his nails, which were taper,
What is frequent in tapers,—that’s wax.
Which is why I remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,—
Which the same I am free to maintain.
Ah Sin’s Reply (Anonymous)
Which my name is Ah Sin;
I don’t want to call names,
But I must, to begin,
Say of this T. James:
That I am convinced he is rather
Well up in the sinfullest games.
Yes, Ah Sin is my name,
Which I need not deny;
What it means is no shame,
You will find, if you try,
That its meaning is something Celestial,
And how is Celestial for High?
And about that small game
I did not understand,
So I made it my aim,
With a smile that was bland,
To keep my small eyes at their keenest
On Nye as he dealt the first hand.
And the way that he dealt,
There could nothing be finer;
But somehow I felt,
“Mr. Ah Sin, from China,
Because your smile is so childlike,
These fellows play you for a minor!”
But no slouch is Ah Sin,
And from the word “Go!”
I did play for to win,
And Nye—rather so;
And I played the new game as I learned him,
Which showed level head, don’t you know?
On my nails there was wax,
But that nothing proves,
When I state the real facts;
I was ’prenticed on shoes,
And the wax that was found on my fingers
Was the kind that our shoemakers use.
And the packs up my sleeve,
My oath I will take,
Were not there to deceive,
But got there by mistake;
I bought them for Ah Sin, the younger,
Who likes some card houses to make.
In my pockets they were
When I sat down that day;
But what with the stir
And excitement of play,
They worked up my sleeve from my pocket,
And strange it was, too, I must say.
Was it right in Bill Nye
When the trump knave I led,
To blacken my eye,
And on me put a head?
Had I known James held the right bower
I’d have played something else in its stead.
But I don’t play no more,
For my lot now is cast
On a euchreless shore,
So I “stick” to my “last,”
And my smile, at North Adams, is pensive
At my heathenish days that are past.
Her Letter
I’m sitting alone by the fire,
Dressed just as I came from the dance,
In a robe even you would admire,—
It cost a cool thousand in France;
I’m be-diamonded out of all reason,
My hair is done up in a cue:
In short, sir, “the belle of the season”
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 10