The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry Read online

  And he tapped with his whip on the shutters,

  but all was locked and barred;

  He whistled a tune to the window,

  and who should be waiting there

  But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,

  Bess, the landlord's daughter,

  Plaiting a dark red love knot

  into her long black hair.

  And dark in the dark old inn-yard

  a stable wicket creaked

  Where Tim the ostler listened;

  his face was white and peaked;

  His eyes were hollows of madness,

  his hair like moldy hay,

  But he loved the landlord's daughter,

  The landlord's red-lipped daughter,

  Dumb as a dog he listened,

  and he heard the robber say—

  "One kiss, my bonny sweetheart,

  I'm after a prize tonight,

  But I shall be back with the yellow gold

  before the morning light;

  Yet, if they press me sharply,

  and harry me through the day,

  Then look for me by moonlight,

  Watch for me by moonlight,

  I'll come to thee by moonlight,

  though hell should bar the way."

  He rose upright in the stirrups;

  he scarce could reach her hand,

  But she loosened her hair in the casement!

  His face burned like a brand

  As the black cascade of perfume

  came tumbling over his breast;

  And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,

  (Oh, sweet, black waves in the moonlight!)

  Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight,

  and galloped away to the West.

  He did not come in the dawning;

  he did not come at noon;

  And out o' the tawny sunset,

  before the rise o' the moon,

  When the road was a gypsy's ribbon,

  looping the purple moor,

  A red-coat troop came marching,

  Marching, marching,

  King George's men came matching,

  up to the old inn-door.

  They said no word to the landlord,

  they drank his ale instead,

  But they gagged his daughter and bound her

  to the foot of her narrow bed;

  Two of them knelt at her casement,

  with muskets at their side!

  There was death at every window;

  And hell at one dark window;

  For Bess could see, through her casement,

  the road that he would ride.

  They had tied her up to attention,

  with many a sniggering jest;

  They had bound a musket beside her,

  with the barrel beneath her breast!

  "Now, keep good watch!"

  and they kissed her.

  She heard the dead man say—

  Look for me by moonlight;

  Watch for me by moonlight;

  I'll come to thee by moonlight,

  though hell should bar the way!

  She twisted her hands behind her;

  but all the knots held good!

  She writhed her hands till her fingers

  were wet with sweat or blood!

  They stretched and strained in the darkness,

  and the hours crawled by like years,

  Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,

  Cold, on the stroke of midnight,

  The tip of one finger touched it!

  The trigger at least was hers!

  The tip of one finger touched it;

  she strove no more for the rest!

  Up, she stood up to attention,

  with the barrel beneath her breast,

  She would not risk their hearing;

  she would not strive again;

  For the road lay bare in the moonlight;

  Blank and bare in the moonlight;

  And the blood of her veins in the moonlight

  throbbed to her love's refrain .

  Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it?

  The horse-hoofs ringing clear;

  Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance?

  Were they deaf that they did not hear?

  Down the ribbon of moonlight,

  over the brow of the hill,

  The highwayman came riding,

  Riding, riding!

  The redcoats looked to their priming!

  She stood up, straight and still!

  Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence!

  Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!

  Nearer he came and nearer!

  Her face was like a light!

  Her eyes grew wide for a moment;

  she drew one last deep breath,

  Then her finger moved in the moonlight,

  Her musket shattered the moonlight,

  Shattered her breast in the moonlight,

  and warned him, with her death.

  He turned; he spurred to the West;

  he did not know who stood

  Bowed, with her head over the musket,

  drenched with her own red blood!

  Not till the dawn he heard it,

  his face grew gray to hear

  How Bess, the landlord's daughter,

  The landlord's black-eyed daughter,

  Had watched for her love in the moonlight,

  and died in the darkness there.

  Back, he spurred like a madman,

  shrieking a curse to the sky,

  With the white road smoking behind him

  and his rapier brandished high!

  Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon;

  wine-red was his velvet coat,

  When they shot him down on the highway,

  Down like a dog on the highway,

  And he lay in his blood on the highway,

  with the bunch of lace at his throat.

  And still of a winter's night, they say,

  when the wind is in the trees,

  When the moon is a ghostly galleon

  tossed upon cloudy seas,

  When the road is a ribbon of moonlight

  over the purple moor,

  A highwayman comes riding,

  Riding, riding,

  A highwayman comes riding,

  up to the old inn door.

  Over the cobbles he clatters

  and clangs in the dark inn yard;

  He taps with his whip on the shutters,

  but all is locked and barred;

  He whistles a tune to the window,

  and who should be waiting there

  But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,

  Bess, the landlord's daughter,

  Plaiting a dark red love knot

  into her long black hair.

  Alfred Noyes, 1906

  Next | TOC> The Highwayman> Benét

  The Ballad of William Sycamore

  (1790-1871)

  My father, he was a mountaineer,

  His fist was a knotty hammer;

  He was quick on his feet as a running deer,

  And he spoke with a Yankee stammer.

  My mother, she was merry and brave,

  And so she came to her labor,

  With a tall green fir for her doctor grave

  And a stream for her comforting neighbor.

  And some are wrapped in the linen fine,

  And some like a godling's scion;

  But I was cradled on twigs of pine

  In the skin of a mountain lion.

  And some remember a white, starched lap

  And a ewer with silver handles;

  But I remember a coonskin cap

  And the smell of bayberry candles,

  The cabin logs, with the bark still rough,

  And my mother, who laughed at trifles,

  And the tall, lank visitors, brown as snuff,

  With their long, straight squirrel-rifles.

  I
can hear them dance, like a foggy song,

  Through the deepest one of my slumbers,

  The fiddle squeaking the boots along

  And my father calling the numbers.

  The quick feet shaking the puncheon-floor,

  And the fiddle squeaking and squealing,

  Till the dried herbs rattled above the door

  And the dust went up to the ceiling.

  There are children lucky from dawn to dusk,

  But never a child so lucky!

  For I cut my teeth on "Money Musk"

  In the Bloody Ground of Kentucky!

  When I grew tall as the Indian corn,

  My father had little to lend me,

  But he gave me his great old powder-horn

  And his woodsman's skill to befriend me.

  With a leather shirt to cover my back,

  And a redskin nose to unravel

  Each forest sign, I carried my pack

  As far as a scout could travel.

  Till I lost my boyhood and found my wife,

  A girl like a Salem clipper!

  A woman straight as a hunting-knife

  With eyes as bright as the Dipper!

  We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed,

  Unheard-of streams were our flagons;

  And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed

  On the trail of the Western wagons.

  They were right, tight boys, never sulky or slow,

  A fruitful, a goodly muster.

  The eldest died at the Alamo;

  The youngest fell with Custer.

  The letter that told it burned my hand.

  Yet we smiled and said, "So be it!"

  But I could not live when they fenced the land,

  For it broke my heart to see it.

  I saddled a red, unbroken colt

  And rode him into the day there;

  And he threw me down like a thunderbolt

  And rolled on me as I lay there.

  The hunter's whistle hummed in my ear

  As the city men tried to move me,

  And I died in my boots like a pioneer

  With the whole wide sky above me.

  Now I lie in the heart of the fat, black soil,

  Like the seed of a prairie-thistle;

  It has washed my bones with honey and oil

  And picked them clean as a whistle.

  And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring,

  And my sons, like the wild-geese flying;

  And I lie and hear the meadow-lark sing

  And I have much content in my dying.

  Go play with the towns you have built of blocks,

  The towns where you would have bound me!

  I sleep in the earth like a tired fox,

  And my buffalo have found me.

  Stephen Vincent Benét, 1922

  Next | TOC> The Highwayman> Housman

  The Carpenter's Son

  "Here the hangman stops his cart:

  Now the best of friends must part

  Fare you well, for ill fare I:

  Live, lads, and I will die.

  "Oh, at home had I but stayed

  'Prenticed to my father's trade,

  Had I stuck to plane and adze,

  I had not been lost, my lads.

  "Then I might have built perhaps

  Gallows-trees for other chaps,

  Never dangled on my own,

  Had I but left ill alone.

  "Now, you see, they hang me high,

  And the people passing by

  Stop to shake their fists and curse;

  So 'tis come from ill to worse.

  "Here hang I, and right and left

  Two poor fellows hang for theft:

  All the same's the luck we prove,

  Though the midmost hangs for love.

  "Comrades, all, that stand and gaze,

  Walk henceforth in other ways;

  See my neck and save your own:

  Comrades all, leave ill alone.

  Make some day a decent end,

  Shrewder fellows than your friend.

  Fare you well, for ill fare I:

  Live, lads, and I will die."

  A. E. Housman, 1896

  Next | TOC> The Highwayman> Service

  The Cremation of Sam McGee

  There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold;

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold;

  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee.

  Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,

  where the cotton blooms and blows.

  Why he left his home in the South to roam

  'round the Pole, God only knows.

  He was always cold, but the land of gold

  seemed to hold him like a spell;

  Though he'd often say in his homely way

  that "he'd sooner live in hell."

  On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way

  over the Dawson trail.

  Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold

  it stabbed like a driven nail.

  If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze

  till sometimes we couldn't see;

  It wasn't much fun, but the only one

  to whimper was Sam McGee.

  And that very night, as we lay packed tight

  in our robes beneath the snow,

  And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead

  were dancing heel and toe,

  He turned to me, and "Cap," says he,

  "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;

  And if I do, I'm asking that you

  won't refuse my last request."

  Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no;

  then he says with a sort of moan:

  "It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold

  till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.

  Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread

  of the icy grave that pains;

  So I want you to swear that, foul or fair,

  You'll cremate my last remains."

  A pal's last need is a thing to heed,

  so I swore I would not fail;

  And we started on at the streak of dawn;

  but God! he looked ghastly pale.

  He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day

  of his home in Tennessee;

  And before nightfall a corpse was all

  that was left of Sam McGee.

  There wasn't a breath in that land of death,

  and I hurried, horror-driven,

  With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid,

  because of a promise given;

  It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:

  "You may tax your brawn and brains,

  But you promised true, and it's up to you

  to cremate those last remains."

  Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,

  and the trail has its own stern code.

  In the days to come, though my lips were dumb,

  in my heart how I cursed that load.

  In the long, long night, by the lone firelight,

  while the huskies, round in a ring,

  Howled out their woes to the homeless snows—

  O God! how I loathed the thing.

  And every day that quiet clay

  seemed to heavy and heavier grow;

  And on I went, though the dogs were spent

  and the grub was getting low;

  The trail was bad, and I felt half mad,

  but I swore I would not give in;

  And I'd often sing to the hateful thing,

  and it hearkened with a grin.

  Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge,

  and a derelict there lay
;

  It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice

  it was called the "Alice May".

  And I looked at it, and I thought a bit,

  and I looked at my frozen chum;

  Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry,

  "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

  Some planks I tore from the cabin floor,

  and I lit the boiler fire;

  Some coal I found that was lying around,

  and I heaped the fuel higher;

  The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—

  such a blaze you seldom see;

  And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal,

  and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

  Then I made a hike, for I didn't like

  to hear him sizzle so;

  And the heavens scowled, and the huskies

  howled, and the wind began to blow.

  It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled

  down my cheeks, and I don't know why;

  And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak

  went streaking down the sky.

  I do not know how long in the snow

  I wrestled with grisly fear;

  But the stars came out and they danced about

  ere again I ventured near;

  I was sick with dread, but I bravely said:

  "I'll just take a peep inside.

  I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked";

  then the door I opened wide.

  And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm,

  in the heart of the furnace roar;

  And he wore a smile you could see a mile,

  and he said: "Please close that door.

  It's fine in here, but I greatly fear

  you'll let in the cold and storm—

  Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,

  it's the first time I've been warm."

  There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold;

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold;

  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee.

  Robert Service, 1907

  Next | TOC> The Highwayman> Service

  The Shooting of Dan McGrew

  A bunch of the boys were whooping it up