Perhaps the most elaborately wrought out of these song ballads is the one which has been reserved for the last. Its text here follows:
Possum’s good an’ hoe cake’s fine,
An’ so is mammy’s pies,
But bes’ of all good t’ings to eat
Is chickens, fryin’ size.
How I lubs a moonlight night
When stars is in de skies!
But sich nights ain’t no good to git
De chickens, fryin’ size.
De moonlight night is shiny bright,
Jes’ like a nigga’s eyes,
But dark nights is the bes’ to git
De chickens, fryin’ size.
When Mahstah he is gone to sleep,
An’ black clouds hides de skies,
Oh, den’s de time to crawl an’ creep
Fer chickens, fryin’ size.
Fer den prehaps you won’t git kotched
Nor hab to tell no lies,
An’ mebbe you’ll git safe away
Wid chickens, fryin’ size.
But you mus’ look out sharp fer noise
An’ hush de chicken’s cries,
Fer mighty wakin’ is de squawks
Of chickens, fryin’ size.
To gross minds this abrupt, admonitory ending of the poem will be disappointing. It leaves the reader wishing for more—more chicken, if not more poetry. And yet in this self-restrained ending of the piece the poet is fully justified by the practice of other great masters of the poetic art. Who that has read Coleridge’s superb fragment “Kubla Khan,” does not long to know more of the “stately pleasure dome” and of those “caverns measureless to man” through which “Alph the sacred river ran, down to a sunless sea”?
We present these illustrative examples of Dick’s verse in full confidence that both his inspiration and his methods will make their own appeal to discriminating minds. If there be objection made to the somewhat irregular word forms employed by this poet, the ready answer is that the same characteristic marks many of the writings of Robert Burns, and that Homer himself employed a dialect. If it is suggested that Dick’s verbs are sometimes out of agreement with their nominatives, it is easy to imagine Dick contemptuously replying, “Who keers ’bout dat?”