The Boston Carrier’s Plaint
THE summer sun, disgusted at some too-familiar cloud,
Had muffled up his brightness in a sort of misty shroud;
The sky o’ercast and leaden-hued, as if in angry pain,
Poured down upon our busy town huge tears of hissing rain.
Amid the crowds that hurried from the sloppy streets amain
Was one poor limping creature—the embodiment of pain.
His pale face, drawn and twisted in a multitude of ways,
Was really calculated quite to shock the public gaze;
His body was contorted; bent his back, and clenched each hand,
And his lips ejaculated words I could not understand;
Yet his phrases, I confess it, were not very transcendental,
For his adjectives, if forcible, were far from ornamental.
I questioned him—this blighted one—I asked him what the reason
Of his sorrow, and his anger, and his language out of season;
And in such a tone he answered, that a Tartar savage prowling
Around the near environs would have thought a wolf was howling:—
“Don’t my uniform tell you that I
Am of the unfortunate band,
Whom you see day by day passing by,
Never pausing a moment to stand;
Who, in one perpetual round,
Forever are marching, until
It seems that while one of us stays overground
Fate ordains he shall never be still.
“’Tis hard when the bright golden sun
Smiles out from a clear azure sky,
To set out on a pilgrimage ne’er to be done
Till his glory has gone and passed by.
And e’en along green country lanes,
’Mid the scent of the newly mown hay,
And a thousand gay birds chanting joyous refrains,
Who would care to be tramping all day?
“Then why do you wonder to hear
An unlucky sad mortal complain,
Who has walked through the Hub, all the day pretty near,
In this ne’er-ending, pitiless rain?
Or say, are you looking for smiles
From a fellow who feels on the rack,
After walking some twenty odd miles
On a path like a porcupine’s back?
“They say that the Muscovite knout,
On the back of a troublesome peasant,
When wielded by hands that are stout,
Is decidedly very unpleasant.
The rack and the thumb-screw, I’m told,
Caused aught but delightful sensations,
But what were their tortures of old,
Compared to our new innovations?
“No martyr that ever yet died
In those times that have long passed away,
Whether gibbeted, hanged, drowned, or fried,
Suffered more than I’ve suffered to-day.
My feet are denuded of skin,
My toes every one are disjointed,
For the soles of my boots are peculiarly thin,
And the most of our pavement is pointed!
“Aye, jagged, like the teeth of a saw,
Or the glass of a smashed window-pane,
Save where an occasional flaw
Leaves a hole in to gather the rain—”
Here my comrade gave vent to a shriek
That emptied a neighboring tavern,
He had planted one foot on a peak,
While the other was lost in a cavern!
Then his language assumed such a tone—
And one not by any means sweeter—
And he mixed up such adverbs with every groan
That they couldn’t be put into metre.
So thus my sad narrative ends,
As I left the poor tortured one raving,
And hoping the rest of his Post-office friends
Would survive Boston’s wonderful paving.