| |
TO HIS COUNTRYMEN
THERE are one or two things I should just like to hint, | |
| For you don’t often get the truth told you in print; | |
| The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders) | |
| Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders; | |
| Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves, | 5 |
| You’ve the gait and the manners of runaway slaves; | |
| Though you brag of your New World, you don’t half believe in it; | |
| And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it; | |
| Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl, | |
| With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl, | 10 |
| With eyes bold as Here ’s, and hair floating free, | |
| And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, | |
| Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, | |
| Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing, | |
| Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass, | 15 |
| Keeps glancing aside into Europe’s cracked glass, | |
| Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, | |
| And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste; | |
| She loses her fresh country charm when she takes | |
| Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes. | 20 |
| |
ON HIMSELF
There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb | |
| With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme, | |
| He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, | |
| But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders, | |
| The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching | 25 |
| Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching; | |
| His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, | |
| But he ’d rather by half make a drum of the shell, | |
| And rattle away till he ’s old as Methusalem, | |
| At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem. | 30 |
| |
