Bunker Hill and Other Poems | Page 3

I 'm
afeard there 'll be more trouble afore the job is done"; So I took one
scorching swallow; dreadful faint I felt and hollow, Standing there
from early morning when the firing was begun.

All through those hours of trial I had watched a calm clock dial, As the
hands kept creeping, creeping,--they were creeping round to four,
When the old man said, "They're forming with their bagonets fixed for
storming:
It 's the death-grip that's a coming,--they will try the works
once
more."
With brazen trumpets blaring, the flames behind them glaring, The
deadly wall before them, in close array they come;
Still onward,
upward toiling, like a dragon's fold uncoiling,-- Like the rattlesnake's
shrill warning the reverberating drum
Over heaps all torn and gory--shall I tell the fearful story, How they
surged above the breastwork, as a sea breaks over a deck; How, driven,
yet scarce defeated, our worn-out men retreated, With their
powder-horns all emptied, like the swimmers from a wreck?
It has all been told and painted; as for me, they say I fainted, And the
wooden-legged old Corporal stumped with me down the stair: When I
woke from dreams affrighted the evening lamps were lighted,-- On the
floor a youth was lying; his bleeding breast was bare.
And I heard through all the flurry, "Send for WARREN! hurry! hurry!
Tell him here's a soldier bleeding, and he 'll come and dress his
wound!"
Ah, we knew not till the morrow told its tale of death and
sorrow, How the starlight found him stiffened on the dark and bloody
ground.
Who the youth was, what his name was, where the place from which he
came was,
Who had brought him from the battle, and had left him at
our door, He could not speak to tell us; but 't was one of our brave
fellows, As the homespun plainly showed us which the dying soldier
wore.
For they all thought he was dying, as they gathered round him crying,--

And they said, "Oh, how they'll miss him!" and, "What will his mother
do?"
Then, his eyelids just unclosing like a child's that has been
dozing, He faintly murmured, "Mother!"--and--I saw his eyes were
blue.
"Why, grandma, how you 're winking!" Ah, my child, it sets me
thinking Of a story not like this one. Well, he somehow lived along; So
we came to know each other, and I nursed him like a--mother, Till at
last he stood before me, tall, and rosy-checked, and strong.
And we sometimes walked together in the pleasant summer weather,--
"Please to tell us what his name was?" Just your own, my little dear,--
There's his picture Copley painted: we became so well acquainted,
That--in short, that's why I 'm grandma, and you children all are here!
AT THE "ATLANTIC" DINNER
DECEMBER 15, 1874
I SUPPOSE it's myself that you're making allusion to
And bringing
the sense of dismay and confusion to.
Of course some must
speak,--they are always selected to,
But pray what's the reason that I
am expected to?
I'm not fond of wasting my breath as those fellows
do;
That want to be blowing forever as bellows do;
Their legs are
uneasy, but why will you jog any
That long to stay quiet beneath the
mahogany?
Why, why call me up with your battery of flatteries?
You say "He
writes poetry,"--that 's what the matter is
"It costs him no trouble--a
pen full of ink or two
And the poem is done in the time of a wink or
two;
As for thoughts--never mind--take the ones that lie uppermost,
And the rhymes used by Milton and Byron and Tupper most;
The
lines come so easy! at one end he jingles 'em,
At the other with
capital letters he shingles 'em,--
Why, the thing writes itself, and
before he's half done with it He hates to stop writing, he has such good

fun with it!"
Ah, that is the way in which simple ones go about
And draw a fine
picture of things they don't know about!
We all know a kitten, but
come to a catamount
The beast is a stranger when grown up to that
amount,
(A stranger we rather prefer should n't visit us,
A felis
whose advent is far from felicitous.)
The boy who can boast that his
trap has just got a mouse
Must n't draw it and write underneath
"hippopotamus";
Or say unveraciously, "This is an elephant,"--

Don't think, let me beg, these examples irrelevant,--
What they mean
is just this--that a thing to be painted well Should always be something
with which we're acquainted well.
You call on your victim for "things he has plenty of,--
Those copies
of verses no doubt at least twenty of;
His desk is crammed full, for he
always keeps writing 'em
And reading to friends as his way of
delighting 'em!"
I tell you this writing of verses means business,--
It
makes the brain whirl in a vortex of dizziness
You think they are