GOOD-BY, LOBSTER
We’ve gazed with resignation on the passing of
the auk,
Nor care a continental for the legendary rok;
And the dodo and the bison and the ornith-o-
rhyn-chus
May go and yet their passing brings no shade of
woe to us.
We entertain no sorrow that the megatherium
Forever and forever is departed, dead and
dumb:
But a woe that hovers o ’er us brings a keen and
bitter pain
As we weep to see the lobster vanish off the
coast of Maine.
Oh, dear crustacean dainty of the dodge-holes
of the sea,
I tune my lute in minor in a threnody for thee.
You’ve been the nation’s martyr and ’twas wrong
to treat you so,
And you may not think we love you; yet we
hate to see you go.
We’ve given you the blazes and hot-potted you,
and yet
We’ve loved you better martyred than when
living, now you bet.
You have no ears to listen, so, alas, we can’t
explain
The sorrow that you bring us as you leave the
coast of Maine.
Do you fail to mark our feeling as we bitterly
deplore
The passing of the hero of the dinner at the
shore?
Ah, what’s the use of living if you also can’t
survive
Until you die to furnish us the joy of one
“broiled live”?
And what can e ’er supplant you as a cold dish
on the side?
Or what assuage our longings when to salads
you’re denied?
Or what can furnish thunder to the legislative
brain
When ruthless Fate has swept you from the rocky
coast of Maine?
I see, and sigh in seeing, in some distant, future
age
Your varnished shell reposing under glass upon
a stage,
The while some pundit lectures on the curios of
the past,
And dainty ladies shudder as they gaze on you
aghast.
And all the folks that listen will wonder vaguely
at
The fact that once lived heathen who could eat
a Thing like that.
Ah, that’s the fate you’re facing—but laments
are all in vain
—Tell the dodo that you saw us when you
lived down here in Maine.