Classic Poem

When Bayard long was pent,
Commissioner at Ghent,
To treat for peace with England, it seemed long.
Napoleon had been quelled,
And America beheld
Her enemies released, their armies strong:
" No Peace for Yankee ye, on circumference or sea,
We burnt your Capital and broke your Treasury;
Your cabinet has run; your invasions they are done —
We'll give you bellyfull before a Peace there'll be! "

So Bayard took the lickin' —
His companion was a Chicken,
It looked as blue as Bayard, was as still;
It crowed no more at dawn,
Its appetite was gone,
That cock of Delaware was deadly ill.
" O, cock of Peter, trump! and lift me from this dump!
You know the war I hated; I voted with the rump. "
The Blue Hen's Chicken faltered,
It seemed a capon altered,
And it could neither tip-toe, nor stretch its neck, nor hump.

McDonough left the main
To sail on Lake Champlain;
His ships he ranged at Plattsburg for defence.
Down came Sir George Prevo,
With Kanucks and Eskimo,
With Indians and regulars and tents.
His army partly beat, he signalled to his fleet:
" Go at him! Sink him! Hull him! Tack and wear! "
(McDonough drew his sap
From a huddle called The Trappe,
On a swell of wheaten plain in Delaware.)

The fleets they hid in smoke,
But all the British broke,
And when the fight was over, punk was the British oak;
They strewed the lake with spars.
Sir George Prevo, as Mars,
Back to his thin, snow country went faster than a poke.

No word had Bayard heard
When, at Ghent, his drooping bird
Took heart and crowed so often that the dead he might have stirred;
In came the British treaters,
Like some penitent St. Peters,
And said, with much politeness: " Well, Peace is now the word! "

" Why change their tune so quick?
Is the British lion sick?
Has Napoleon come from Elba? Is it not a kind of trick? "
The rooster crowed and tread
So fiercely, Bayard said:
" I wonder if McDonough's cut the comb right off their head? "
Yes! That battle stopped the war.
The farmer sailor's star
Moved in the constellations of the Nile and Trafalgar.
" PEACE! " All the nations heard —
McDonough spoke that word —
And all the hens in Delaware laid eggs for Bayard's bird.