The art that has secured thy deathless fame?
And this we swear: We will endorse no name
But thine alone to old Melpomene,
Nor will revolve, since rising sons are we,
Round any orb, save, dear Modjeska, thee
Who art our Pole star, and will ever be.
As originally written by Field, the rhymes in the first four lines of this tribute fell alternately, the lines being transposed so that they ran in order first, third, fourth, and second of the poem as it appears above. For the fifth and sixth lines of his first version Field wrote:
What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes
When we are hired to rail and criticise?
It is a question the reader can decide for himself whether his second thought was an improvement. His original intention contemplated a longer poem, but after he had written a fourteenth line that read: