Lawd, Lawd, when de rocks in dis mountain turn to gol’.’
John Henry hammered in de mountains,
An’ his hammer was strikin’ fire,
He drove so hard till he broke his pore heart,
An’ he lied down his hammer an’ he died,
Lawd, Lawd, he lied down his hammer an’ he died.
John Henry had a li’l baby,
Hel’ him in de palm of his han’.
Oe las’ words I heard de pore boy say:
‘Son, yo’re gonna be a steel-drivin’ man,
Son, yo’re gonna be a steel-drivin’ man!’
John Henry had a pretty li’l ’ooman,
An’ de dress she wo’ was blue,
An’ de las’ words she said to him:
‘John Henry, I’ve been true to you,
Lawd, Lawd, John Henry, I’ve been true to you.’
John Henry had anothah ’ooman,
De dress she wo’ wuz red.
De las’ words I heard de pore gal say:
‘I’m goin’ w’eah mah man drapt daid,
I’m goin’ w’eah mah man drapt daid!’
‘Oh, who’s gonna shoe yo’ li’l feetses,
An’ who’s gonna glub yo’ han’s,
An’ who’s gonna kiss yo’ rosy, rosy lips,
An’ who’s gonna be yo’ man,
Lawd, Lawd, an’ who’s gonna be yo’ man?’
Dey took John Henry to de graveyard,
An’ dey buried him in de san’,
An’ every locomotive come roarin’ by,
Says, ‘Dere lays a steel-drivin’ man,
Lawd, Lawd, dere lays a steel-drivin’ man.’
Frankie and Johnny
Frankie and Johnny were lovers, O lordy how they could love.
Swore to be true to each other, true as the stars above;
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie she was his woman, everybody knows.
She spent one hundred dollars for a suit of Johnny’s clothes.
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie and Johnny went walking, Johnny in his bran’ new suit,
‘O good Lawd,’ says Frankie, ‘but don’t my Johnny look cute?’
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie went down to Memphis; she went on the evening train.
She paid one hundred dollars for Johnny a watch and chain.
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie went down to the corner, to buy a glass of beer;
She says to the fat bartender, ‘Has my loving man been here?
He was my man, but he done me wrong.’
‘Ain’t going to tell you no story, ain’t going to tell you no lie,
I seen your man ‘bout an hour ago with a girl named Alice Bly –
If he’s your man, he’s doing you wrong.’
Frankie went back to the hotel, she didn’t go there for fun,
Under her long red kimono she toted a forty-four gun.
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie went down to the hotel, looked in the window so high,
There was her lovin’ Johnny a-lovin’ up Alice Bly;
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie went down to the hotel, she rang that hotel bell,
‘Stand back all of you floozies or I’ll blow you all to hell,
I want my man, he’s doin’ me wrong.’
Frankie threw back her kimono; took out the old forty-four;
Roota-toot-toot, three times she shot, right through that hotel door.
She shot her man, ’cause he done her wrong.
Johnny grabbed off his Stetson. ‘O good Lawd, Frankie, don’t shoot.’
But Frankie put her finger on the trigger, and the gun went roota-toot-toot.
He was her man, but she shot him down.
‘Roll me over easy, roll me over slow,
Roll me over easy, boys, ’cause my wounds are hurting me so,
I was her man, but I done her wrong.’
With the first shot Johnny staggered; with the second shot he fell;
When the third bullet hit him, there was a new man’s face in hell.
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
Frankie heard a rumbling away down under the ground.
Maybe it was Johnny where she had shot him down.
He was her man, and she done him wrong.
‘Oh, bring on your rubber-tired hearses, bring on your rubber-tired hacks,
They’re takin’ my Johnny to the buryin’ groun’ but they’ll never bring him back.
He was my man, but he done me wrong.’
The judge he said to the jury, ‘It’s plain as plain can be.
This woman shot her man, so it’s murder in the second degree.
He was her man, though he done her wrong.’
Now it wasn’t murder in the second degree, it wasn’t murder in the third.
Frankie simply dropped her man, like a hunter drops a bird.
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
‘Oh, put me in that dungeon. Oh, put me in that cell.
Put me where the northeast wind blows from the southeast corner of hell.
I shot my man ’cause he done me wrong.’
Frankie walked up to the scaffold, as calm as a girl could be,
She turned her eyes to heaven and said, ‘Good Lord, I’m coming to thee.
He was my man, and I done him wrong.’
Edgar Lee Masters 1869–1950
The Hill
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer,
the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?–
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution? –
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
Elsa Wertman
I was a peasant girl from Germany,
Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong.
And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene’s.
On a summer’s day when she was away
He stole into the kitchen and took me
Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat,
I turning my head. Then
neither of us
Seemed to know what happened.
And I cried for what would become of me.
And cried and cried as my secret began to show.
One day Mrs Greene said she understood,
And would make no trouble for me,
And, being childless, would adopt it.
(He had given her a farm to be still.)
So she hid in the house and sent out rumors,
As if it were going to happen to her.
And all went well and the child was born – They were so kind to me.
Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed.
But – at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying
At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene –
That was not it.
No! I wanted to say:
That’s my son! That’s my son!
Editor Whedon
To be able to see every side of every question;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human family
For base designs, for cunning ends,
To wear a mask like the Greek actors –
Your eight-page paper – behind which you huddle,
Bawling through the megaphone of big type:
‘This is I, the giant.’
Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,
Poisoned with the anonymous words
Of your clandestine soul.
To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
Or to sell papers,
Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
To win at any cost, save your own life.
To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,
As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
And derails the express train.
To be an editor, as I was.
Then to lie here close by the river over the place
Where the sewage flows from the village,
And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
And abortions are hidden.
‘Butch’ Weldy
After I got religion and steadied down
They gave me a job in the canning works,
And every morning I had to fill
The tank in the yard with gasoline,
That fed the blow-fires in the sheds
To heat the soldering irons.
And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,
Carrying buckets full of the stuff.
One morning, as I stood there pouring,
The air grew still and seemed to heave,
And I shot up as the tank exploded,
And down I came with both legs broken,
And my eyes burned crisp as a couple of eggs.
For someone left a blow-fire going,
And something sucked the flame in the tank.
The Circuit Judge said whoever did it
Was a fellow-servant of mine, and so
Old Rhodes’ son didn’t have to pay me.
And I sat on the witness stand as blind
As Jack the Fiddler, saying over and over,
‘I didn’t know him at all.’
Edwin Arlington Robinson 1869–1935
Reuben Bright
Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughterhouse.
Miniver Cheevy
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Eros Turannos
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost. –
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.
A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days –
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate
with her seclusion.
We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be, –
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen, –
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
Mr Flood’s Party
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:
‘Well, Mr Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.’ He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: ‘Well, Mr Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.’
Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.
Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:
‘Well, Mr Flood, we have not met like this.
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 19