The sun never shone,
The rain could not fall
On a steadier man than John.
A holy man was John,
And honest withal.
His mates had never heard
Drop from his guarded lip
An idle word,
But twice—first, while on board his ship,
When he had lost his pipe, he swore,
Just a mild damn, and nothing more;
And once he cursed
The government; but then he reckoned
The Lord forgave him for the first,
And justified the second.
And he was temperate in all his ways,
Was John;
He never drank, but when Thanksgiving days
Came on;
Never in summer on a fishing trip
Would he allow the smell on board his ship;
Only in winter or in autumn,
When a cramp or something caught him,
Would he take it, for he prized it,
Not for its depraved abuses,
But for its discreeter uses,
As his Church had authorized it.
The sun had never shone
On a kinder man than John,
Nor upon
A better Christian than was John.
He was good to his dog, he was good to his cat,
And his love went out to his horse;
He loved the Lord and his Church, of course,
For righteous was he in thought and act;
And his neighbors knew, in addition to that,
He loved his wife, as a matter of fact.
Now, one fine day it occurred to John,
That his last great cramp was on;
For nothing that the doctor wrote
Could stop that rattle in his throat.
He had broken his back upon the oar,
He had dried his last boat-load of cod,
And nothing was left for John any more,
But to drift in his boat to the port of God.
Creatures of Another Country
I
THE BIRD OF PARADISE
Answer my riddle, will you? Nay,
Do not toss your head that way,
With such a ruffle of passion.
I merely asked you who was fleeced
To pay the jeweller and modiste
For this last word in fashion.
I have a right, if you only knew,
To put this delicate point to you—
Those sapphires dancing on your crest,
That cluster of rubies on your breast,
That necklace there, those pearls! The price?
Who paid it? Bird of Paradise!
And the only kind of reply that came
Out of that vision of tropical flame
Was that little ruffle of passion.
A tango of color from scarlet to green
Evolved as I watched the beauty preen
Her plumes in that maddening fashion.
So I left the Bird of the Garden to call,
This time, upon the Bird of the Hall;
For my temples beat with the throb of fire,
And I could not find in that land of Desire
A cooling wind, or water, or ice
To quench a fever in Paradise.