Norwalk expands the blaze; o’er Redding hills
High flaming Danbury the welkin fills.
Esopus burns, New York’s deliteful fanes
And sea-nursed Norfolk light the neighboring plains.
But Barlow’s best poem was “Hasty Pudding,” a mock-heroic after the fashion of Philips’s “Cider,” and not, I think, inferior to that. One couplet, in particular, has prevailed against the tooth of time:—
E’en in thy native regions how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush!
This poem was written in 1792 in Savoy, whither Barlow had gone to stand as deputy to the National Convention. In a little inn at Chambéry, a bowl of polenta, or Indian meal pudding, was set before him, and the familiar dish made him homesick for Connecticut. You remember how Dr. Holmes describes the dinners of the young American medical students in Paris at the Trois Frères; and how one of them would sit tinkling the ice in his wineglass, “saying that he was hearing the cowbells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset.”
THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE
MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of the American people. He is the idol of a literary culte. Shall I tell you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling newspaper poetry of the usual kind—and very poor of its kind—which had attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice. I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world will say—as in fact it did—‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile, democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here must be the great American poet at last.’ ”