You nor me—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
This is the requiem of the Fifteen Dead Men that Eugene Cowles would sing so effectively in his booming bass after rehearsals of “The Ogallallas.” It must have been great!
Allison felt that he had done little justice to an idea full of great possibilities and made a number of revisions during the polishing process until it was raised to five verses. I have the original manuscript† † Reproduced in [facsimile]. of the first revision of “A Piratical Ballad” unearthed from a cubby-hole in an old desk of his to which I fell heir, the only change being in the title to “A Ballad of Dead Men,” the elimination of one of the concluding lines “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” from the refrain of each verse, (it had been added originally to fit the musical cadence), and the strengthening of the final verse by the substitution of—
With willing hearts
And a Yo-heave-ho
Over the side
To the sharks below.
Many will no doubt recall “The Philosophy of Composition”† † Stone & Kimball Edition. Vol. 6; page 31. by Edgar Allen Poe, and those who by some mischance have missed it, can spend a delightful hour in the perusal of what, beyond the least doubt, is the most skillful analysis of poetic composition ever written, even though it fails to carry conviction that “The Raven” was ever produced by the formula described. Poe declared that—