| |
| IS this the Bowling Green? I should not know it, | |
| So disarrayed, defaced, and gone to seed, | |
| Like some un-Pegasused and prosy poet, | |
| Whose Helicon is now the bowl and weed; | |
| Its Green, if grass, does not precisely show it, | 5 |
| So changed to worse from that once lovely mead. | |
| |
| Not Time has done it only, Desecration | |
| Has with corrosive finger touched the place; | |
| The iron fence, its once proud decoration, | |
| The street, the mansions round, share the disgrace,— | 10 |
| Now but the stepping-stone of every nation, | |
| The point of fusion for the human race. | |
| |
| The houses once, long since, in evening’s glory | |
| Shone with a tranquil beauty; and on stoops | |
| Maidens would listen while the old, old story | 15 |
| Beguiled the twilight; and broad-skirted groups | |
| Displayed their sabres moderately gory, | |
| Displacing with good Dutch the Indians’ whoops. | |
| |
| And in my own day, later, I remember | |
| Those pleasant houses and their pleasant hosts, | 20 |
| Where gleamed like topaz in the dying ember | |
| The old Madeira (then we drank to toasts). | |
| Ah me! that June of life is now December, | |
| And all those smiling figures, are but ghosts. | |
| |
| Yon dingy alien, limping from his steamer; | 25 |
| The colorless, abandoned look of all; | |
| The broken flags, the fountain’s silvery tremor; | |
| The homes for aye disprivacied, and the wall | |
| Cuirassed in gilded sign-boards,—pain the dreamer, | |
| And all his blissful memories appall. | 30 |
| |
| Ah! ’t was a dear old town, that lost Manhattan, | |
| With its green shores, whose islands still had trees; | |
| And round them gleamed the sun-touched bay like satin, | |
| When the sun sank, and shut its wings the breeze. | |
| Oh! why was it obliged to grow and fatten? | 35 |
| Those modest days in worth outvalued these. | |
| |
| The visitor, I may say without flattery, | |
| Finds few, if any, ports to match the view | |
| (When the wind’s up, the walk is slightly spattery) | |
| Of bustling, white-winged craft and laughing blue, | 40 |
| Which fixes him enchanted on the Battery,— | |
| So full of life, forever fresh and new. | |
| |
| If, as a boy I did, I make my haunt in | |
| Dear Castle Garden, soon I find a check | |
| In two policemen, who, my courage daunting, | 45 |
| Stand sentinels beside that piteous wreck, | |
| And point to signs; I read, Für Emigranten, | |
| And just beyond I see an emptying deck. | |
| |
| In the far future, haply, the town completed, | |
| That foreign wave no more shall strike the shore, | 50 |
| And the boys then shall frolic there as we did, | |
| And maidens flower-like bloom beside the door, | |
| And happy people shall behold repeated | |
| Such a Manhattan as we loved of yore. | |
| |
