Classic Poem

A BALLAD FOR MY CHILDREN .

Little ones at my knee,
The New-Year chimes ring sweet,
Silver-clear on the frosty air
The blithe New-Year to greet.
But while the shouting world
Its vivat sends to heaven,
List as I tell you a stirring tale
Of buried Fifty-seven.

Once, when on glittering skates
Blithe Januarius came,
Fleet as a reindeer leaving far
His polar halls aflame,
Over the wintry hills,
Beside the frozen streams,
One story strange he told by day,
One tale by night in dreams.

Wherever an icicle hung,
Wherever the snow lay white,
Wherever the gleaming boreal fires
Lit up the winter night;
On every icy rift,
On every frosted pane,
With the busy skill of a weird fakir
He wrote the name of Kane.

Kings on their jewelled thrones,
Grave councillors of state
Trying, in diplomatic scales,
The nations as by weight,
Each politic scheme forgot,
Listened, with eyes grown bright,
As Winter whistled the epic grand
Of that savage arctic fight.

He fought with sickness gaunt,
He grappled with hunger fierce;
He stifled, with firm, courageous words,
Dark Mutiny's muttered curse;
Seeking, 'midst crunching bergs
Where the white bear growled alone,
Some token for her whose grief had roused
The nations with its moan.

He fought with the drifting floes,
He fought with the hummocks wild,
Looking to God, 'midst the trackless snows,
With the heart of a little child;
And bursting the silent gate
To the land of dark and dole,
A trophied conqueror he returned
With the secret of the pole.

A victor he came; but the spears
Of the monster he defied
Had pierced to the core of his brave young heart,
And chilled its crimson tide;
So, while the welcome home
Still rang from mount and lea,
He voyaged out to that Unknown Land
Where there is no more sea.

The Genoese, who first
Made strange, adventurous way
Over the seas, had golden dreams
Of beautiful, far Cathay;
And, fired with the magical show
Of blossoming grove and plain,
With an eager heart and a flashing eye
Sailed over the pathless main.

But he, our martyr brave,
There lay before his eye
Only a sullen, desolate waste
Where bones of dead men lie:
Wastes where no sound is heard
But the crash of the drifting ice,
No language writ, save, quaint and grim,
The frost-work's wild device.

Victors from battle-fields
Have come with banners gay,
But none with a braver heart than he
Whose story I tell you to-day.
Little ones at my knee,
Remember its lesson plain,
And keep in your hearts, as a precious thing,
The memory of Kane.