Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William McCarty, comp. The American National Song Book. 1842.

On the Death of Commodore Oliver H. Perry

John Gardiner Calkins Brainard (1795–1828)

HOW sad the note of that funereal drum,

That’s muffled by indifference to the dead!

And how reluctantly the echoes come,

On air that sighs not o’er that stranger’s bed,

Who sleeps with death alone—O’er his young head

His native breezes never more shall sigh;

On his lone grave the careless step shall tread,

And pestilential vapours soon shall dry

Each shrub that buds around—Each flower that blushes nigh.

Let Genius, poising on her full-fledged wing,

Fill the charm’d air with thy deserved praise:

Of war, and blood, and carnage let her sing,

Of victory and glory!—let her gaze

On the dark smoke that shrouds the cannon’s blaze;

On the red foam that crests the bloody billow;

Then mourn the sad close of thy shorten’d days;

Place on thy country’s brow the weeping willow,

And plant the laurels thick around thy last cold pillow.

No sparks of Grecian fire to me belong:

Alike uncouth the poet and the lay:

Unskill’d to turn the mighty tide of song,

He floats along the current as he may,

The humble tribute of a tear to pay,

Another hand may choose another theme,

May sing of Nelson’s last and brightest day,

Of Wolfe’s unequall’d and unrivall’d fame,

The wave of Trafalgar—the field of Abraham.

But if the wild winds of thy western lake

Might teach a harp that fain would mourn the brave,

And sweep those strings a minstrel may not wake,

Or give an echo from some secret cave

That opens on romantic Erie’s wave,

The feeble chord would not be swept in vain;

And though the sound might never reach thy grave,

Yet there are spirits here, that to the strain

Would send a still small voice responsive back again.

And though the yellow plague infest the air;

Though noxious vapours blight the turf, where rest

The manly form, and the bold heart of war;

Yet should that deadly isle afar be blest;

For the fresh breezes of thy native west

Should seek and sigh around thy early tomb,

Moist with the tears of those who loved thee best,

Scented with sighs of love; there grief should come,

And memory guard thy grave, and mourn thy hapless doom.

It may not be. Too feeble is the hand,

Too weak and frail the harp, the lay too brief

To speak the sorrows of a mourning land,

Weeping in silence for her youthful chief.

Yet may an artless tear proclaim more grief

Than mock affection’s arts can ever show;

A heart-felt sigh can give a sad relief,

Which all the sobs of counterfeited woe,

Trick’d off in foreign garb could ever hope to know.