On her famishing bosom her babe newly born;
The cool waters rippled the rock ferns beside,
And sweetly the rain-plover sung in the corn.
“Back!” shouted the foe, with their cross-bows upraised:
She drew to her fever-spent bosom her boy;
And her thin, withered face to the blazing sky raised,
And leaped, and lay dead in the blue Illinois!
Oh, the gray rock that hung
O’er the billows of blooms,
Where the rain-plover sung