Classic Poem

Jack CORNSTALK IN HIS TEENS

If not in the Garden, he had in the ark,
To neither the beasts' nor the passengers' joy,
Full many a boyish and monkeyish lark,
The sandy-complexioned, the freckled-faced boy.

And down through the ages he rattles the drums,
While armies and nations each other destroy;
The century goes, and the century comes,
But he lives on for ever, the freckled-faced boy.

All over the world are the lands of his birth;
And when Time and Transgression this planet destroy
He will come to advise the last man on the earth,
The fatherly, chummy, the freckled-faced boy.