Thomas Hood- Collected Poetical Works

by Thomas Hood

  And man a tyrant over all his breed.

  He could not read

  Of niggers whipt, or over-trampled weavers,

  But he applied their wrongs to his own seed,

  And nourish’d thoughts that threw him into fevers;

  His very dreams were full of martial beavers,

  And drilling Pugs, for liberty pugnacious,

  To sever chains vexatious:

  In fact, he thought that all his injur’d line

  Should take up pikes in hand, and never drop ‘em

  Till they had cleared a road to Freedom’s shrine,

  Unless perchance the turn-pike men should stop ‘em.

  Full of this rancour,

  Pacing one day beside St. Clement Danes,

  It came into his brains

  To give a look in at the Crown and Anchor;

  Where certain solemn sages of the nation

  Were at that moment in deliberation

  How to relieve the wide world of its chains,

  Pluck despots down,

  And thereby crown

  Whitee- as well as blackee-man-cipation.

  Pug heard the speeches with great approbation.

  And gaz’d with pride upon the Liberators;

  To see mere coal-heavers

  Such perfect Bolivars —

  Waiters of inns sublim’d to innovators,

  And slaters dignified as legislators —

  Small publicans demanding (such their high sense

  Of liberty) an universal license —

  And pattern-makers easing Freedom’s clogs-

  The whole thing seem’d

  So fine, he deem’d

  The smallest, demagogues as great as Gogs!

  Pug, with some curious notions in his noddle,

  Walk’d out at last, and turn’d into the Strand,

  To the left hand,

  Conning some portions of the previous twaddle,

  And striding with a step that seem’d design’d

  To represent the mighty March of Mind,

  Instead of that slow waddle

  Of thought, to which our ancestors inclin’d —

  No wonder, then, that he should quickly find

  He stood in front of that intrusive pile,

  Where Cross keeps many a kind,

  Of bird confin’d,

  And free-born animal, in durance vile —

  A thought that stirr’d up all the monkey-bile!

  The window stood ajar —

  It was not far,

  Nor, like Parnassus, very hard to climb —

  The hour was verging on the supper-time,

  And many a growl was sent through many a bar.

  Meanwhile Pug scrambled upward like a tar,

  And soon crept in,

  Unnotic’d in the din

  Of tuneless throats, that made the attics ring

  With all the harshest notes that they could bring;

  For like the Jews,

  Wild beasts refuse,

  In midst of their captivity — to sing.

  Lord! how it made him chafe,

  Full of his new emancipating zeal,

  To look around upon this brute-bastille,

  And see the king of creatures in — a safe!

  The desert’s denizen in one small den,

  Swallowing slavery’s most bitter pills —

  A bear in bars unbearable. And then

  The fretful porcupine, with all its quills

  Imprison’d in a pen!

  A tiger limited to four feet ten;

  And, still worse lot,

  A leopard to one spot!

  An elephant enlarg’d,

  But not discharg’d;

  (It was before the elephant was shot;)

  A doleful wanderoo, that wandered not;

  An ounce much disproportion’d to his pound.

  Pug’s wrath wax’d hot

  To gaze upon these captive creature’s round;

  Whose claws — all scratching — gave him full assurance

  They found their durance vile of vile endurance.

  He went above — a solitary mounter

  Up gloomy stairs — and saw a pensive group

  Of hapless fowls —

  Cranes, vultures, owls,

  In fact, it was a sort of Poultry-Compter,

  Where feather’d prisoners were doom’d to droop:

  Here sat an eagle, forc’d to make a stoop,

  Not from the skies, but his impending roof;

  And there aloof,

  A pining ostrich, moping in a coop;

  With other samples of the bird creation;

  All cag’d against their powers and their wills,

  And cramp’d in such a space, the longest bills

  Were plainly bills of least accommodation.

  In truth, it was a very ugly scene

  To fall to any liberator’s share,

  To see those winged fowls, that once had been

  Free as the wind, no freer than fixed air.

  His temper little mended,

  Pug from this Bird-cage Walk at last descended

  Unto the lion and the elephant,

  His bosom in a pant

  To see all nature’s Free List thus suspended,

  And beasts depriv’d of what she had intended.

  They could not even prey

  In their own way;

  A hardship always reckon’d quite prodigious.

  Thus he revolv’d —

  And soon resolv’d

  To give them freedom, civil and religious.

  That night there were no country cousins, raw

  From Wales, to view the lion and his kin:

  The keeper’s eyes were fix’d upon a saw;

  The saw was fix’d upon a bullock’s shin!

  Meanwhile with stealthy paw,

  Pug hastened to withdraw

  The bolt that kept the king of brutes within.

  Now, monarch of the forest! thou shalt win

  Precious enfranchisement — thy bolts are undone;

  Thou art no longer a degraded creature,

  But loose to roam with liberty and nature;

  And free of all the jungles about London —

  All Hampstead’s heathy desert lies before thee!

  Methinks I see thee bound from Cross’s ark,

  Full of the native instinct that comes o’er thee,

  And turn a ranger

  Of Hounslow Forest, and the Regent’s Park- -

  Thin Rhodes’s cows — the mail-coach steeds endanger,

  And gobble parish watchman after dark: —

  Methinks I see thee, with the early lark,

  Stealing to Merlin’s cave — (thy cave.) — Alas,

  That such bright visions should not come to pass!

  Alas, for freedom, and for freedom’s hero!

  Alas, for liberty of life and limb!

  For Pug had only half unbolted Nero,

  When Nero bolted him!

  DEATH’S RAMBLE.

  One day the dreary old King of Death

  Inclined for some sport with the carnal,

  So he tied a pack of darts on his back,

  And quietly stole from his charnel.

  His head was bald of flesh and of hair,

  His body was lean and lank,

  His joints at each stir made a crack, and the cur

  Took a gnaw, by the way, at his shank.

  And what did he do with his deadly darts,

  This goblin of grisly bone?

  He dabbled and spill’d man’s blood, and he kill’d

  Like a butcher that kills his own.

  The first he slaughter’d, it made him laugh,

  (For the man was a coffin-maker,)

  To think how the mutes, and men in black suits,

  Would mourn for an undertaker.

  Death saw two Quakers sitting at church,

  Quoth he, “We shall not differ.”

  And he le
t them alone, like figures of stone,

  For he could not make them stiffer.

  He saw two duellists going to fight,

  In fear they could not smother;

  And he shot one through at once — for he knew

  They never would shoot each other.

  He saw a watchman fast in his box,

  And he gave a snore infernal;

  Said Death, “He may keep his breath, for his sleep

  Can never be more eternal.”

  He met a coachman driving his coach

  So slow, that his fare grew sick;

  But he let him stray on his tedious way,

  For Death only wars on the quick.

  Death saw a toll-man taking a toll,

  In the spirit of his fraternity;

  But he knew that sort of man would extort,

  Though summon’d to all eternity.

  He found an author writing his life,

  But he let him write no further;

  For Death, who strikes whenever he likes,

  Is jealous of all self-murther!

  Death saw a patient that pull’d out his purse,

  And a doctor that took the sum;

  But he let them be — for he knew that the “fee”

  Was a prelude to “faw” and “fum.”

  He met a dustman ringing a bell,

  And he gave him a mortal thrust;

  For himself, by law, since Adam’s flaw,

  Is contractor for all our dust.

  He saw a sailor mixing his grog,

  And he marked him out for slaughter;

  For on water he scarcely had cared for Death,

  And never on rum-and-water.

  Death saw two players playing at cards,

  But the game wasn’t worth a dump,

  For he quickly laid them flat with a spade,

  To wait for the final trump!

  CRANIOLOGY.

  ’Tis strange how like a very dunce,

  Man — with his bumps upon his sconce,

  Has lived so long, and yet no knowledge he

  Has had, till lately, of Phrenology —

  A science that by simple dint of

  Head-combing he should find a hint of,

  When scratching o’er those little poll-hills,

  The faculties throw up like mole-hills;

  A science that, in very spite

  Of all his teeth, ne’er came to light,

  For though he knew his skull had grinders,

  Still there turned up no organ finders,

  Still sages wrote, and ages fled,

  And no man’s head came in his head —

  Not even the pate of Erra Pater,

  Knew aught about its pia mater.

  At last great Dr. Gall bestirs him —

  I don’t know but it might be Spurzheim —

  Tho’ native of a dull and slow land,

  And makes partition of our Poll-land;

  At our Acquisitiveness guesses,

  And all those necessary nesses

  Indicative of human habits,

  All burrowing in the head like rabbits.

  Thus Veneration, he made known,

  Had got a lodging at the Crown;

  And Music (see Deville’s example)

  A set of chambers in the Temple;

  That Language taught the tongues close by,

  And took in pupils thro’ the eye,

  Close by his neighbor Computation,

  Who taught the eyebrows numeration.

  The science thus — to speak in fit

  Terms — having struggled from its nit,

  Was seized on by a swarm of Scotchmen

  Those scientifical hotch-potch men,

  Who have at least a penny dip,

  And wallop in all doctorship,

  Just as in making broth they smatter

  By bobbing twenty things in water:

  These men, I say, made quick appliance

  And close, to phrenologic science;

  For of all learned themes whatever,

  That schools and colleges deliver,

  There’s none they love so near the bodles,

  As analysing their own noddles;

  Thus in a trice each northern blockhead

  Had got his fingers in his shock head,

  And of his bumps was babbling yet worse

  Than poor Miss Capulet’s dry wet-nurse;

  Till having been sufficient rangers

  Of their own heads, they took to strangers’.

  And found in Presbyterians’ polls

  The things they hated in their souls!

  For Presbyterians hear with passion

  Of organs joined with veneration.

  No kind there was of human pumpkin

  But at its bumps it had a bumpkin;

  Down to the very lowest gullion,

  And oiliest skull of oily scullion.

  No great man died but this they did do,

  They begged his cranium of his widow:

  No murderer died by law disaster,

  But they took off his sconce in plaster;

  For thereon they could show depending,

  “The head and front of his offending”:

  How that his philanthropic bump

  Was mastered by a baser lump;

  For every bump (these wags insist)

  Has its direct antagonist,

  Each striving stoutly to prevail,

  Like horses knotted tail to tail!

  And many a stiff and sturdy battle

  Occurs between these adverse cattle,

  The secret cause, beyond all question,

  Of aches ascribed to indigestion, —

  Whereas ’tis but two knobby rivals

  Tugging together like sheer devils,

  Till one gets mastery, good or sinister,

  And comes in like a new prime-minister.

  Each bias in some master node is: —

  What takes M’Adam where a road is,

  To hammer little pebbles less?

  His organ of Destructiveness.

  What makes great Joseph so encumber

  Debate? a lumping lump of Number:

  Or Malthas rail at babies so?

  The smallness of his Philopro —

  What severs man and wife? a simple

  Defect of the Adhesive pimple:

  Or makes weak women go astray?

  Their bumps are more in fault than they.

  These facts being found and set in order

  By grave M. D.’s beyond the Border,

  To make them for some months eternal,

  Were entered monthly in a journal,

  That many a northern sage still writes in,

  And throws his little Northern Lights in,

  And proves and proves about the phrenos,

  A great deal more than I or he knows:

  How Music suffers, par exemple,

  By wearing tight hats round the temple;

  What ills great boxers have to fear

  From blisters put behind the ear;

  And how a porter’s Veneration

  Is hurt by porter’s occupation;

  Whether shillelaghs in reality

  May deaden Individuality;

  Or tongs and poker be creative

  Of alterations in th’ Amative;

  If falls from scaffolds make us less

  Inclined to all Constructiveness:

  With more such matters, all applying

  To heads — and therefore head-ifying.

  A PARTHIAN GLANCE.

  “Sweet Memory, wafted by thy gentle gale,

  Oft up the stream of time I turn my sail.” — ROGERS.

  Come, my Crony, let’s think upon far-away days,

  And lift up a little Oblivion’s veil;

  Let’s consider the past with a lingering gaze,

  Like a peacock whose eyes are inclined to his tail.

  Aye, come, let us turn our attention behind,

 
Like those critics whose heads are so heavy, I fear,

  That they cannot keep up with the march of the mind,

  And so turn face about for reviewing the rear.

  Looking over Time’s crupper and over his tail,

  Oh, what ages and pages there are to revise!

  And as farther our back-searching glances prevail,

  Like the emmets, “how little we are in our eyes!”

  What a sweet pretty innocent, half-a-yard long,

  On a dimity lap of true nursery make!

  I can fancy I hear the old lullaby song

  That was meant to compose me, but kept me awake.

  Methinks I still suffer the infantine throes,

  When my flesh was a cushion for any long pin —

  Whilst they patted my body to comfort my woes,

  Oh! how little they dreamt they were driving them in!

  Infant sorrows are strong — infant pleasures as weak —

  But no grief was allow’d to indulge in its note;

  Did you ever attempt a small “bubble and squeak,”

  Through the Dalby’s Carminative down in your throat?

  Did you ever go up to the roof with a bounce?

  Did you ever come down to the floor with the same?

  Oh! I can’t but agree with bath ends, and pronounce

  “Heads or tails,” with a child, an unpleasantish game!

  Then an urchin — I see myself urchin indeed —

  With a smooth Sunday face for a mother’s delight;

  Why should weeks have an end? — I am sure there was need

  Of a Sabbath, to follow each Saturday night.

  Was your face ever sent to the housemaid to scrub?

  Have you ever felt huckaback soften’d with sand?

  Had you ever your nose towell’d up to a snub,

  And your eyes knuckled out with the back of the hand?

  Then a school-boy — my tailor was nothing in fault,

  For an urchin will grow to a lad by degrees, —

  But how well I remember that “pepper-and-salt”

  That was down to the elbows, and up to the knees!

  What a figure it cut when as Norval I spoke!

  With a lanky right leg duly planted before;

  Whilst I told of the chief that was kill’d by my stroke,

  And extended my arms as “the arms that he wore!”