John Marr and Other Poems | Page 3

one string,
This way and that,
and anyhow a sting.
The flag and your kin, how be true unto both?

If either plight ye keep, then ye break the other
troth.
But elect here they must, though the casuists
were out;
Decide--hurry up--and throttle every doubt.
Of all these thrills thrilled at keelson, and
throes,
Little felt the shoddyites a-toasting o' their
toes;
In mart and bazar Lucre chuckled the huzza,
Coining the
dollars in the bloody mint of war.
But in men, gray knights o' the Order o' Scars,
And brave boys bound
by vows unto Mars,
Nature grappled honor, intertwisting in the
strife:--
But some cut the knot with a thoroughgoing
knife.
For how when the drums beat? How in the fray
In Hampton
Roads on the fine balmy day?
There a lull, wife, befell--drop o' silent in the
din.
Let us enter that silence ere the belchings
re-begin.
Through a ragged rift aslant in the cannonade's
smoke
An iron-clad reveals her repellent broadside
Bodily intact.
But a frigate, all oak,
Shows honeycombed by shot, and her deck
crimson-dyed.
And a trumpet from port of the iron-clad hails,

Summoning the other, whose flag never trails:
"Surrender that frigate,
Will! Surrender,
Or I will sink her--ram, and end her!"

'T was Hal. And Will, from the naked heart-o'-oak,
Will, the old
messmate, minus trumpet, spoke,
Informally intrepid,--"Sink her, and
be
damned!"* [* Historic.]
Enough. Gathering way, the iron-clad
rammed.
The frigate, heeling over, on the wave threw a
dusk.
Not sharing in the slant, the clapper of her bell
The fixed
metal struck--uinvoked struck the
knell
Of the Cumberland stillettoed by the
Merrimac's tusk;
While, broken in the wound underneath the
gun-deck,
Like a sword-fish's blade in leviathan waylaid,
The tusk
was left infixed in the fast-foundering
wreck.
There, dungeoned in the cockpit, the wounded
go down,
And the chaplain with them. But the surges
uplift
The prone dead from deck, and for moment
they drift
Washed with the swimmers, and the spent
swimmers drown.
Nine fathom did she sink,--erect, though hid
from light
Save her colors unsurrendered and spars that
kept the height.
Nay, pardon, old aunty! Wife, never let it fall,
That big started tear
that hovers on the brim;
I forgot about your nephew and the
Merrimac's
ball;
No more then of her, since it summons up him.
But talk o'
fellows' hearts in the wine's genial

cup:--
Trap them in the fate, jam them in the strait,
Guns speak their
hearts then, and speak
right up.
The troublous colic o' intestine war
It sets the bowels o'
affection ajar.
But, lord, old dame, so spins the whizzing world,
A
humming-top, ay, for the little boy-gods
Flogging it well with their
smart little rods,
Tittering at time and the coil uncurled.
Now, now, sweetheart, you sidle away,
No, never you like that_ kind
o' _gay;
But sour if I get, giving truth her due,
Honey-sweet forever,
wife, will Dick be to you!
But avast with the War! 'Why recall racking
days
Since set up anew are the slip's started stays?
Nor less, though
the gale we have left behind,
Well may the heave o' the sea remind.

It irks me now, as it troubled me then,
To think o' the fate in the
madness o' men.
If Dick was with Farragut on the night-river,

When the boom-chain we burst in the fire-raft's
glare,
That blood-dyed the visage as red as the liver;
In the Battle
for the Bay too if Dick had a
share,
And saw one aloft a-piloting the war--
Trumpet in the
whirlwind, a Providence in
place--
Our Admiral old whom the captains huzza,
Dick joys in the
man nor brags about the race.
But better, wife, I like to booze on the days
Ere the Old Order
foundered in these very
frays,
And tradition was lost and we learned strange
ways.
Often I think on the brave cruises then;
Re-sailing them in
memory, I hail the press o'

men
On the gunned promenade where rolling they
go,
Ere the dog-watch expire and break up the
show.
The Laced Caps I see between forward guns;
Away from the
powder-room they puff the
cigar;
"Three days more, hey, the donnas and the
dons!"
"Your Zeres widow, will you hunt her up,
Starr?"
The Laced Caps laugh, and the bright waves
too;
Very jolly, very wicked, both sea and crew,
Nor heaven looks
sour on either, I guess,
Nor Pecksniff he bosses the gods' high mess.

Wistful ye peer, wife, concerned for my head,
And how best to get
me betimes to my bed.
But king o' the club, the gayest golden spark,
Sailor o' sailors, what
sailor do I mark?
Tom Tight, Tom Tight, no fine fellow finer,
A
cutwater nose, ay, a spirited soul;
But, bowsing away at the
well-brewed bowl,
He never bowled back from that last voyage to
China.
Tom was lieutenant in the brig-o'-war famed
When an officer was
hung for an arch-mutineer,
But a mystery cleaved, and the captain
was
blamed,
And a rumpus too raised, though his honor
it was clear.
And Tom he would say, when the mousers
would try him,
And with cup after cup o' Burgundy ply him:

"Gentlemen, in vain with your wassail you

beset,
For the more I tipple, the tighter do I get."
No blabber, no,
not even with the can--
True to