Classic Poem

O crab exuvious! what of thee can man
Excogitate, or find in Fancy's fields
Aught to the muse acceptable? for now
The dog-star rages, and at ninety-two
The mercury hangs, with not a drop of rain,
For nine or ten unwatered, weltering weeks!
In such a stress, if any muse can sing,
Of all the nine, I give it up, and take
My cool siesta, where the forenoon breeze
Creeps languidly along the Pequot beach.

But still thou comest, punctual to the time,
Cancer or crab — mine annual of the sea,
True to thy symbol in the Zodiac!

Amid the arid wastes of Africa,
Or in the Libyan desert's dewless sands,
The scorpion and the adder thrive in dust;
But thy more aqueous appetite requires
Sea-water, although shallow. When the time
Comes when the lean mosquito, seeking blood,
Marauds o'er midnight slumberers, and takes
From dreams divine, the culminating charm,
And when without the " R " as goodwives tell,

The festive oyster flavorless abides
In unmolested and forbidden beds,
And summer cholics cheer the hopeful quack,
Men look for thee. Dilapidated nets
Of last year's manufacture take anew
Indubious meshes, calculated well
To set at naught thy clashing mandibles,
And hold thee struggling and belligerent.

Then, when I hear the Bank street Gabriel
Solicitous, wind loud his sheet-iron horn,
Proclaiming to the lovers of good feed
That crabs have come, I can endorse his notes,
And honor them, although on " Groton Bank. "

Some with a trident rude, or cruel prong
Impale thy adamantine coat of mail,
And thus impair the sport, like shooting trout.
The proper thing is to procure a net,
(And borrowed ones are oftentimes the best!)
And lift thee gently from the lucent tide,
With all thy armor still inviolate.

The truant school boy, wading in the cove,
When the salt tide is out, with cunning hand
Secures thee without danger. Greater, he,
Than all the Persian Shah can arrogate;
That moslem potentate whose jewels rare
Out-rival all the cost and brilliancy
Of Koh-i-noor, never caught a crab!
How abject and how miserable he
Who lives in rural sections far removed
From ocean's brim, where shell-fish never come,
Save when in keg or canister entombed,
Exanimate and vapid! How unlike
That gustatory and delicious dish,
Exhaling all the flavor of the wave,
That serves for picnic luncheons by the sea!

Most awkward of ungainly things that swim!
First cousin to that monstrous and disformed
Voracious, horrid hydra! that men call
The lobster, when thy shell is young and soft.
I love thee well! but when of later growth,
Though doomed to go to pot, where Moll, the cook,
Like Hecate, by the bubbling cauldron stands,
And holding down the pot-lid with a spoon,
With fell intent, remorseless as a Fate,
Abbreviates thy existence — then I own
Thy case, O crab, must be considered hard!