Samuel Kettell, ed. Specimens of American Poetry. 1829.
By Tabitha TowzerThomas Green Fessenden (1771–1837)
M
No guinea pig ever was neater,
Like a hakmatak slender and spare,
And sweet as a mush-squash, or sweeter.
When dress’d in her pretty new tucker,
Like an otter that paddles the creek,
In quest of a mud-pout, or sucker.
Ah! smoother than that, on my soul,
And turn’d, as a body may say,
Like a delicate neat wooden-bowl.
As straight as a carpenter’s line,
For similes sure must be rare,
When we speak of a nymph so divine.
That never was shaven or shorn.
Nought equals the locks of my dear,
But the silk of an ear of green corn.
With a sled-runner crook in the middle,
Which one would be led to suppose
Was meant for the head of a fiddle.
Glass buttons shone never so bright,
Their love-lighted lustre outvies
The lightning-bug’s twinkle by night.
She makes in my bosom a pother,
When leering politely askance,
She shuts one, and winks with the other.
As a hogshead of maple molasses,
And the ruby-red tint of her cheek,
The gill of a salmon surpasses.
Nor ever described in a novel,
Of a beautiful kind of pea-green,
And shaped like a wooden-shod-shovel.
Were wings of a bat in perfection;
A dollar I never should grudge
To put them in Peale’s grand collection.
At least till our language is richer;
Much fairer than ladle of tin,
Or beautiful brown earthern pitcher.
Never join’d head and body together,
Like nice crook’d-neck’d squash on the ground,
Long whiten’d by winter-like weather.
I might by some phrase that’s improper,
Give modesty’s bosom alarms,
Which I would n’t do for a copper.
You might think I intended to banter;
She moves with more grace you would swear,
Than a founder’d horse forced to a canter.
Which ravish’d you out of your senses;
A pig will make just such a noise
When his hind leg stuck fast in the fence is.