—a message went to Rat-land
******
And lo! a race of rats was at hand
******
They swarmed into the highest towers,
And loitered in the fairest bowers,
And sat down where the mayor sat,
And also in his Sunday hat;
And gnawed revengefully thereat.
With rats for mayor and rats for people,
With rats in the cellar and rats in the steeple,
With rats without and rats within,
Stood poor, deserted Hamelin.
Like Dunbar, Cotter is a satirist of his people—or certain types of his people—a gentle, humorous, affectionate satirist. His medium for satire is dialect, inevitably. Sententious wisdom, irradiated with humor, appears in these pieces in homely garb. In standard English, without satire or humor that wisdom thus appears:
What deeds have sprung from plow and pick!
What bank-rolls from tomatoes!
No dainty crop of rhetoric
Can match one of potatoes.
The gospel of work has been set forth by our poet in a four-act poetic drama entitled Caleb, the Degenerate. All the characters are Negroes. The form is blank verse—blank verse of a very high order, too. The language, like Shakespeare’s—though Browning rather than Shakespeare is suggested—is always that of a poet. The wisdom is that of a man who has observed closely and pondered deeply. Idealistic, philosophical, poetical—such it is. It bears witness to no ordinary dramatic ability.
“Best bard, because the wisest,” says our Israfel. Verily. “Sage” you may call this man as well as “bard.” The proof is in poems and tales, apologues and apothegms. Joseph Seamon Cotter is now sixty years of age. Yet the best of him, according to good omens, is yet to be given forth, in song, story, precept, and drama. His nature is opulent—the cultivation began late and the harvest grows richer.
The chief event of his life, I doubt not, remains to be mentioned—a very sad one. This was the untimely death of his poet-son, Joseph S. Cotter, Jr. Born of this sorrow was the following lyric:
Oh, my way and thy way,
And life’s joy and wonder,
And thy day and my day
Are cloven asunder.
Oh, my trust and thy trust,
And fair April weather,
And thy dust and my dust
Shall mingle together.
The Son
Dead at the age of twenty-three years, Joseph S. Cotter, Jr., left behind a thin volume of lyrics, entitled The Band of Gideon, and about twenty sonnets of an unfinished sequence, and a little book of one-act plays. I will presently place the remarkable title-poem of his book of lyrics before the reader, but first I will give two minor pieces, without comment: