Up in Maine

Good-by, Lobster

We’ve gazed with resignation on the passing of the auk,

Nor care a continental for the legendary rok;

And the dodo and the bison and the ornith-o-

rhyn-chus

May go and yet their passing brings no shade of woe to us.

We entertain no sorrow that the megatherium

Forever and forever is departed, dead and dumb:

But a woe that hovers o ’er us brings a keen and bitter pain

As we weep to see the lobster vanish off the coast of Maine.

Oh, dear crustacean dainty of the dodge-holes of the sea,

I tune my lute in minor in a threnody for thee.

You’ve been the nation’s martyr and ’twas wrong to treat you so,

And you may not think we love you; yet we hate to see you go.

We’ve given you the blazes and hot-potted you, and yet

We’ve loved you better martyred than when living, now you bet.

You have no ears to listen, so, alas, we can’t explain

The sorrow that you bring us as you leave the coast of Maine.

Do you fail to mark our feeling as we bitterly deplore

The passing of the hero of the dinner at the shore?

Ah, what’s the use of living if you also can’t survive

Until you die to furnish us the joy of one

“broiled live”?

And what can e ’er supplant you as a cold dish on the side?

Or what assuage our longings when to salads you’re denied?

Or what can furnish thunder to the legislative brain

When ruthless Fate has swept you from the rocky coast of Maine?

I see, and sigh in seeing, in some distant, future age

Your varnished shell reposing under glass upon a stage,

The while some pundit lectures on the curios of the past,

And dainty ladies shudder as they gaze on you aghast.

And all the folks that listen will wonder vaguely at The fact that once lived heathen who could eat a Thing like that.

Ah, that’s the fate you’re facing—but laments are all in vain

—Tell the dodo that you saw us when you lived down here in Maine.