Classic Poem

Under a rattling whirligig,
Which a Yankee had taught to spin,
A maiden sat, with bosom flat,
And fingers long and thin;
And she was the slave of a dismal scamp,
A man with a soul of tin.

And hers was a chest like a coffin lid,
And cheeks like the churchyard clay,
And pulses that feel like the click of steel
Picking a life away.
Daily dying, and toiling still,
For the dismal scamp in his dismal mill,
Under the shadow of Bunker Hill —
What does she sing or say?

" Oh! why are my eyes so large and bright,
And my fingers so long and thin? "
" The better, my dear, for the spindles' flight,
The faster, my love, to spin " —
Spoke the maiden whose lungs were lint,
And the man with the soul of — tin.

" Would God that my skin were not so white,
And my brain of a lesser size!
And would that my hair were kinked so tight
That I couldn't shut my eyes!
And oh! for an hour in the sunny fields,
Where the snow-white cotton grows;
For the heaviest, hardest task that yields
Free breath and sweet repose!
For a night that never knew a lamp,
And a day that has a close! "

Sung to the rattle and roar and tramp,
In the heart of a merciless mill,
Under the light of a dismal lamp,
And the shadow of Bunker Hill.

Poets of doodledom! true and sweet,
What sensitive plants ye are,
Ready to faint at a cry from Crete,
Or Borioboola-Gha!
Ye have rhymed the slave from his happy cave
And bloodhound in the swamp;
Give us a stave for the maiden slave,
With the black wolf's bite, and her living grave
In the den of the dismal scamp.