[VIII
“GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER!”]
“NO,” SAID my friend Annabel Lee, “I can’t really say that I care for Trowbridge. All that you have said is true enough, but he fails to interest me.”
“What do you like in literature?” I asked, regarding her with interest, for I had never heard her say. It must need be something characteristic of herself.
“I like strength, and I like simplicity, and I like emotion, and I like vital things always. And I like poetry rather than prose. Just now,” said Annabel Lee, “I am thinking of an old-fashioned bit of verse that to me is all that a poem need be. To have written it is to have done enough in the way of writing, because it’s real—like your Trowbridge.”
“Oh, will you repeat it for me!” I said.
“It is called, ‘Give Me Three Grains of Corn, Mother.’ It is of a famine in Ireland a great many years ago—a lad and his mother starving.”
And then she went on:
“‘Give me three grains of corn, mother,
Give me three grains of corn,
’Twill keep the little life I have
Till the coming of the morn.
I am dying of hunger and cold, mother,
Dying of hunger and cold,
And half the agony of such a death
My lips have never told.
“‘It has gnawed like a wolf at my heart, mother,
A wolf that is fierce for blood,
All the livelong day and the night, beside—
Gnawing for lack of food.
I dreamed of bread in my sleep, mother,
And the sight was heaven to see—
I awoke with an eager, famishing lip,
But you had no bread for me.