A SONG OF SUNRISE
(On the Morning of the Russian Revolution)
To those who drink the golden mist
Whereon the world’s horizons rest,
Who teach the peoples to resist
The terrors of the human breast:—
By burning stake and prison-camp
They lead the march of man divine,
Above whose head the sacred lamp
Of liberty doth blaze and shine;
O’er blood and tears and nameless woe
They hail far off the dawning light;
Through faith in them the nations go,
Sun-smitten in the deepest night:—
Honor to them from East to West
Be on the shouting earth to-day!
Holy their memory! Sweet their rest!
Who fill the skies with freedom’s ray!
H. C. Bunner
Henry Cuyler Bunner, one of our most delightful writers of light verse, was born at Oswego, New York, in 1855. At twenty-two he was appointed editor of Puck (then the most prominent of comic weeklies), a position which he held until his death. For more than ten years he wrote almost all the rhymed contributions to that journal—to say nothing of quantities of short stories (his Short Sixes, first published in 1890, are still well-known), prose paragraphs, topical parodies, editorials, etc. Like Field, the artist was finally buried in the journalist; but, unlike him, Bunner kept the work of the serious poet separate from that of the manufacturer of satiric trifles. Yet, in spite of certain exquisite fragments in Airs from Arcady (1884) and Rowen: Second Crop Songs (1892), Bunner is likely to be remembered chiefly for his flippant vers de société, his skilful and grave absurdities.
“Behold the Deeds!” is a splendid example of Bunner’s wit and technical ingenuity. It is a burlesque of the old ballads in the guise of a Chant-Royal, one of the strictest and most difficult of the French forms. Another of his uncollected comic pieces (“Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe”) owes its origin to the fact that a certain Western poet (Joaquin Miller) had composed a poem in which the name of the author of “Faust” was made to rhyme with “teeth.” Bunner not only adopted this rhyme, but carried the broad satire further by mispronouncing Molière, achieving one of his happiest compositions.
Bunner’s was, at best, an artificial world, a world of graceful compliments, polite evasions, rhymed billets doux, with light sighs and lighter laughter tinkling among the tea-cups. Bunner died, in New Jersey, in 1896.