Classic Poem

Uncouth batrachian! ye whose curious tribe,
So long unsung, invites the comic muse,
What shall be said of thee to tempt the mood
Of frolic fancy? Sitting on a log,
Oft have I watched thy quaint placidity,
Who ever as my vagrant step approached,
With quick galvanic spasm would'st hurl thyself—
With leap precipitate and headlong plunge,
Into the startled pool, emerging soon,
With wary eye at some remoter point,
Scanning the scant horizon of thy sea—
A stagnant mill-pond, for an enemy.

'Tis natural to wish to be the first
In something, and in native homeliness,
Thou peerless art, and both grotesque and grave—
Profound and sage and impurtable,
Thou art the very Bunsby of the brook!

But unlike those who outer show denotes
An excellence quite foreign to the truth—
Horrid thou art, not dangerous. Virtue moves
Immaculate through the slippery dens of vice,
Her snow-white wings unsullied by a stain!
So thou, habituant of malarial pools,
Emergest shining, with thy grass-green vest
Untarnished as a virgin emerald!
But thou, like man, existence cannot buy,
Exempt from insecurity. Above,
The fish-hawk, with sagacious glance observes
Thy slightest motion, and voracious drops,
Swift as a stone through the resistless air,
And bolts thee all remorseless! Underneath
The gudgeon and the pickerel take thee in,
Or reckon thee among their sure assets.
So life is full of danger. Weaponless
Art thou, not like the lean and hungry shark,
Whose serrate jaws with quick fatality
Deracinates his prey with sudden snap,
Or that spasmodic eel whose stunning shock,
Electric, strikes with unexpected death
His huge antagonist, thy simple life
Is but too frequently abridged to serve
Some epicurean appetite that finds
Thy fine transparent flesh most delicate.

Time was, when yet the new-created world
Was but a mass of mud; and muck and mire
Comprised the total of the real estate
Of the apochryphal preadamites—
Concerning which, astute geologists
Expound queer facts, or else collossal lies!
Chaos was king; and the mephitic air,
Surcharged with carbon irrespirable,
Bred hideous shapes, which but to nominate,
Forces philosophy to tongues extinct.
This was the very paradise of frogs!
The seventh heaven of the Iguanodon,
The Icthyosaurus, and the nameless forms—
Shapes hideous as nightmare—that alone
Inhabited the unaccomplished world.
And there, conjectureless, thy one wild note,
Traversed the desolate and dismal void,
With stridulous vociferation harsh,
That made more grim the illimitable waste,
With ululation indescribable!
But where was naught but universal slough,
Now stand the populous places of the earth,
Where numerous as the industrious ant that builds
His arenicious domes in spicy woods
Of far Brazil, man congregates, of whom
Not insignificant the number who
Have been the theme of high poetic praise—
Worth less because they rapined on their kind
By aid of reason which thou hast not—crushed
The poor, assumed an air of righteousness—
Were first where ostentatious charity
Made human devils look respectable—
Drove to the church in punctual gorgeousness,
In gilded equipages—men less worth
Than many a frog that on a brookside bog
Enjoys the sunshine of his little day,
That never robbed his friend, or broke the heart
Of orphans by extortionate designs,
Made widows suicides, or forced to crime
Impoverished virtue; but enough of this:
Weak man is full of fallibility:
Justice is hoodwinked, and her good right arm
That should but bear the sword of equity,
Is often palsied by a golden weight.
But fare the well, my friend: I must be brief:
My song grows hoarse; my hurdy-gurdy's tired;
And so like thee, I'll plunge myself again
Into blank silence and obscurity,
Till more poetic sunshine thaws me out!