“I have a canoe,
I will stick to you like a burr,
I have lost my mind.”
may, to the languishing Uap youths or lovelorn maids express all the tenderness of Lover’s
“What would you do, love, if I were going,
With white sail flowing,
The seas beyond?” etc.
In both songs we have a limitless expanse of seas, and eternal fidelity (how full is the image of a “burr” with its side glance of annoying persistence!). It is in the last line, however, that the Uap song bears the palm, and rises to a height of self-knowledge rarely attained by poets, of all men, and beyond all praise in its open confession of what is patent to all.
Let no one hereafter cast a slur on Uap poetry,—least of all those who admire Emily Dickinson, that belated Uap poetess, who would have been hailed as a Sappho had she been born under the palms of The Carolines.