Page:Two Mock Epics (Hanuman and Tantum Religio), Lyrics, Post Meridian Verse, The Turret Captain's Toast and other Verses.pdf/90

 His tow-pate through the rainbow panes

Whack! whack! a stalwart musket brains

That too precocious poppy head;

Its opiate seeds and milk juice scatters,

The hollow capsule cleaves and shatters,

Coating the walls a creamy red.

Or, if some prattling infant, crying,

Clung to your knees, its mother dying,

Shot through the womb, the babe to seize,

What joy! the dimpling legs to squeeze,

Then, grasping firmly by the heels,

And gloating o’er its piteous squeals,

To whirl it sling-like round your shoulders

And dash its brains out on the boulders!

What a hushed silence then succeeds

As the smashed corpselet throbs and bleeds,

A carrion man, a shattered nought,

Once palpitating life and thought.

Oh! Sixteen-twenty! glorious flint-age!

Faith’s climacteric! human vintage!

Better than thine, O famed Grumello!

Of purpling vines and clusters mellow,

Now mantling o’er thy rock Tarpeian

And castles’ mouldering battlements,

Screening its lizard-haunted rents!

Then from thy crenelled fastness swung

The purpling heretic, from lung

Apostate tortured cries were rent

And through the blood-damp air were spent

Wind-wafted to the empyrean.

Then all thy splintered precipice

Ran crude with human sacrifice,