TEN HOURS AT THE FORGE
Elihu Burritt’s journal, June 19, 1838
And then, by lantern light you read
Sixty lines Hebrew, thirty pages French,
its phrases springing from the page as fluently
as the river Seine you’ve yet to see;
ten pages Cuvier’s Theory; eight lines
Syriac – and who besides yourself
in this township, or the state, to understand?
ten lines Danish, ten ditto Bohemian,
one line less of Polish. That night
you memorize fifteen names of stars.
So much to learn, when one is pupil
and master too! A poor man’s university,
where each hammer-stroke helps solve
a question you pose mathematically.
The bellows breathe in Latin and Greek.
The flames feed your own philosophy.
In time you’ll learn to read
fifty human languages and translate
each of them to “peace,” the word
you’d write on every tongue.
Listen:
A SHIP GOES AGROUND OFF NANTUCKET
based on Elihu Burritt’s “A Child’s Question”
Fifty-four Forty or Fight! It looks like war,
United States against the Motherland.
And off the coast of Massachusetts, Mother
Nature brews a storm.
Against the wind, British sea-men
wrestle down their sails.
But still, their ship
wrecks on the shoals off Nantucket.
Merchants and whalers, good Nantucketeers
rope themselves in, throw themselves
into the waves to save foreign sailors
from a common foe and friend, the Sea.
Now observe this English mariner
shivering and drenched,
wrapped in Yankee
comforters and warmed with tea
as a small child asks
her father, isn’t this the enemy
we wish to go to war
to kill?
Listen:
TO FIRE THE FORGE
The furnace and forge-buildings with all their chimneys
have sunk from being undermined... This is a characteristic
feature of The Black Country.
- Walks in the Black Country
This whole town’s built on under-tunneled ground
where coal pays wages. Here’s the collier’s door –
it sinks so gently, you don’t hear a sound.
Beneath, they dig with pick; with sledge they pound
a way toward deeper-buried seams: black ore.
This whole town’s built on under-tunneled ground
where roofs that settle, day by day, astound.
The steeple’s lost another inch or more;
it sinks so gently, you don’t hear a sound.
Through passages by torchlight, ironbound,
the miners delve toward hell, or planet’s core.
This whole town’s built on under-tunneled ground
that can not hold. Though greening hills surround,
their roots can’t stay the tide, nor timbers shore
what sinks so gently, you don’t hear a sound –
no word of outrage, just earth’s sigh profound
at what our tools have wrought and can’t restore.
The whole town’s built on under-tunneled ground
that sinks so gently, you don’t hear a sound.
Listen to more poems:
Fugitive
For the German Workers
Graces of an English Landscape
Churchyard Meditations
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