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From “A Fable for Critics”
THERE are truths you Americans need to be told, | |
| And it never ’ll refute them to swagger and scold; | |
| John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in choler. | |
| At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar; | |
| But to scorn i-dollar-try ’s what very few do, | 5 |
| And John goes to that church as often as you do. | |
| No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him, | |
| ’T is enough to go quietly on and outgrow him; | |
| Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One | |
| Displacing himself in the mind of his son, | 10 |
| And detests the same faults in himself he ’d neglected | |
| When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected; | |
| To love one another you ’re too like by half, | |
| If he is a bull, you ’re a pretty stout calf, | |
| And tear your own pasture for naught but to show | 15 |
| What a nice pair of horns you ’re beginning to grow. | |
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| There are one or two things I should just like to hint, | |
| For you don’t often get the truth told you in print; | |
| The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders) | |
| Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders; | 20 |
| Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves, | |
| You ’ve the gait and the manner of runaway slaves; | |
| Though you brag of your New World, you don’t half believe in it; | |
| And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it; | |
| Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl, | 25 |
| With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl, | |
| With eyes bold as Herë ’s, and hair floating free, | |
| And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, | |
| Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, | |
| Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing, | 30 |
| Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass, | |
| Keeps glancing aside into Europe’s cracked glass, | |
| Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, | |
| And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste; | |
| She loses her fresh country charm when she takes | 35 |
| Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes. | |
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