Classic Poem

CAPUTXXVI

What of Mumma? Ah, poor Mumma
Is a woman, therefore weak!
Frailty's name, alas! is woman:
Porcelain is not half so brittle.

When the hand of fate had snatched her
From her great and glorious husband,
To her sorrow she succumbed not,
Did not pine and die of grieving.

On the contrary, existence
Was as gay for her as ever;
Still she danced before the public,
Courting daily its approval;

Till a permanent appointment
And establishment for life
She obtained at last in Paris,
In the famed Botanic Garden.

In that garden, with my Juliet
When I walked the other Sunday,
Holding forth to her on Nature,
On the beasts and plants and flowers,

On the golden pheasants, cedars
Of Mount Lebanon, giraffes,
On the dromedary, zebra —
While we strolled along conversing —

On the way we stood together
By the rampart of the pit
Where the bears are kept, — and Heavens!
What a spectacle transfixed us!

An enormous desert-bear
From Siberia, white and shaggy,
Much too amorously sported
Down below us with a she-bear;

And the she-bear was our Mumma!
Was the wife of Atta Troll!
By the moist and tender gleaming
Of her gentle eyes I knew her.

Yes, 'twas she, the swarthy daughter
Of the South! 'Twas she, our Mumma,
Living mated with a Russian,
A barbarian of the North!

Said a negro with a simper,
Who had sidled up towards us,
" On the earth could aught be fairer
Than the sight of happy lovers? "

And I answered, " Prithee, tell me
Who thus honours me by speaking. "
But the negro cried, astounded,
" Has my face, then, been forgotten?

" I am he, the Moorish monarch
Who in Freiligrath went drumming.
In your Germany most wretched
Was my life — such isolation!

" Here, however, where as keeper
I have duly been appointed,
'Mongst the plants, the lions, tigers
Of my home amid the tropics,

" It is vastly more congenial
Than of old, when as a drummer
At your German fairs I figured,
Daily drumming, badly fed.

" And but recently I married
An Alsatian cook, a blonde.
By her ample arms encircled,
I am solaced in my exile.

" When I see her feet they mind me
Of our elephants for grace,
While her French recalls the sweetness
Of my black, my mother tongue.

" When she scolds — and that is often —
I can hear the rattling drum,
See the skulls that dangled round it —
Snakes and lions fled before it.

" But by moonlight she is tender,
And she weeps with soft emotion
Like the crocodile, for coolness
From the tepid river peeping.

" And the dainty toothsome morsels
That she gives me! I am thriving:
Have an appetite as healthy
As of old, beside the Niger.

" I am fat; am now the owner
Of a paunch — a swarthy crescent
That my shirt of snowy linen
Like a fleecy cloud envelops. "