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Four American poets

Chapter 59: OLD IRONSIDES.
By Sherwin Cody
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About This Book

Aimed at young readers, this compact collection presents four readable biographical sketches of notable poets, following childhood influences, schooling, early experiments in verse, and the circumstances behind key works. Each section pairs narrative anecdotes with explanations of themes such as nature, moral conviction, and public engagement, and includes episodes about professional life, honors, and later years. Organized into short chapters that highlight formative scenes, poetic methods, and memorable incidents, the book uses plain language and illustrative detail to make poetic craft and imagery accessible while encouraging appreciation of differing temperaments and literary approaches.

CHAPTER VII
A BUDDING POET

We have already seen in one of Holmes’s letters to Phineas Barnes that while in college he was “writing poetry like mad.” In the appendix to the latest complete edition of his poems you will find some lines translated from the Æneid while he was a student at Andover, not yet sixteen years old. In college he was poet to the Hasty Pudding Club; had a poem at Exhibition, one at Commencement, and was elected class poet; besides that, he joined several classmates in a volume of satirical poems on the first regular art exhibition in Boston.

When he finished his college course he studied law for a year, though his father rather wished him to be a clergyman. Says he, “I might have been a clergyman myself, for aught I know, if a certain clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker.” Think of the little smooth-voiced joker in the pulpit! In another place he says, “How grandly the procession of old clergymen who filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof, marches before my closed eyes!” You must remember that Holmes was the son of the orthodox clergyman of Cambridge, and these were the men who exchanged pulpits with his father.

At first, as an experiment, he studied law for a year; but he did not work very hard. He was writing poetry. A paper called the Collegian was started, and he contributed twenty-five or more poems to it, among which were some of his funniest and best. “The Last Leaf” and “The Height of the Ridiculous” were among the work of that first poetic year of his. He never thought much of these poems, though some people consider them quite as good as the poems of the famous Thomas Hood, who wrote—

“Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care,—
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young and so fair!”

Because he didn’t like them, or thought them too rollicking, he did not reprint many of them. Here is one, perhaps the first of his poems ever printed with his name, which appeared in February, 1830, under the title “Runaway Ballad”:

I
Wake from thy slumbers, Isabel, the stars are in the sky,
And night has hung her silver lamp, to light her altar by;
The flowers have closed their faded leaves, and drooped upon the plain;
Oh! wake thee, and their dying hues shall blush to life again.
II
Get up! get up! Miss Polly Jones, the tandem’s at the door;
Get up and shake your lovely bones, it’s twelve o’clock and more;
The chaises they have rattled by, and nothing stirs around,
And all the world but you and me are snoring safe and sound.
III
I’ve got my uncle’s bay, and trotting Peggy, too,
I’ve lined their tripes with oats and hay, and now for love and you!
The lash is curling in the air, and I am at your side;
To-morrow you are Mrs. Snaggs, my bold and blooming bride.

Here is another, entitled “Romance”:

Oh! she was a maid of a laughing eye,
And she lived in a garret cold and high;
And he was a threadbare, whiskered beau,
And he lived in a cellar damp and low.

But not all his early poems were nonsense like these. One day, in the fall of 1830, he read in the Boston Advertiser a paragraph saying that the Navy Department at Washington intended to break up the frigate Constitution, which had fought so bravely in the War of 1812, and won such glory for the American people. Immediately he wrote the following poem, which stands at the beginning of his collected works:

OLD IRONSIDES.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
The banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

This stirring poem was published on the next day but one, and was immediately copied into nearly every newspaper in the United States. Copies were even printed as handbills and distributed about the city of Washington. Because the people felt so badly about it, the Navy Department at last decided not to break up Old Ironsides.