TO CHILDREN: FOR TYRANTS

Strike not thy dog with a stick!

I did it yesterday:

Not to undo though I gained

The Paradise: heavy it rained

On Kobold's flanks, and he lay.

Little Bruno, our long-ear pup,

From his hunt had come back to my heel.

I heard a sharp worrying sound,

And Bruno foamed on the ground,

With Koby as making a meal.

I did what I could not undo

Were the gates of the Paradise shut

Behind me: I deemed it was just.

I left Koby crouched in the dust,

Some yards from the woodman's hut.

He bewhimpered his welting, and I

Scarce thought it enough for him: so,

By degrees, through the upper box-grove,

Within me an old story hove,

Of a man and a dog: you shall know.

The dog was of novel breed,

The Shannon retriever, untried:

His master, an old Irish lord,

In an oaken armchair snored

At midnight, whisky beside.

Perched up a desolate tower,

Where the black storm-wind was a whip

To set it nigh spinning, these two

Were alone, like the last of a crew,

Outworn in a wave-beaten ship.

The dog lifted muzzle, and sniffed;

He quitted his couch on the rug,

Nose to floor, nose aloft; whined, barked;

And, finding the signals unmarked,

Caught a hand in a death-grapple tug.

He pulled till his master jumped

For fury of wrath, and laid on

With the length of a tough knotted staff,

Fit to drive the life flying like chaff,

And leave a sheer carcase anon.

That done, he sat, panted, and cursed

The vile cross of this brute: nevermore

Would he house it to rear such a cur!

The dog dragged his legs, pained to stir,

Eyed his master, dropped, barked at the door.

Then his master raised head too, and sniffed:

It struck him the dog had a sense

That honoured both dam and sire.

You have guessed how the tower was afire.

The Shannon retriever dates thence.

I mused: saw the pup ease his heart

Of his instinct for chasing, and sink

Overwrought by excitement so new:

A scene that for Koby to view

Was the seizure of nerves in a link.

And part sympathetic, and part

Imitatively, raged my poor brute;

And I, not thinking of ill,

Doing eviller: nerves are still

Our savage too quick at the root.

They spring us: I proved it, albeit

I played executioner then

For discipline, justice, the like.

Yon stick I had handy to strike

Should have warned of the tyrant in men.

You read in your History books,

How the Prince in his youth had a mind

For governing gently his land.

Ah, the use of that weapon at hand,

When the temper is other than kind!

At home all was well; Koby's ribs

Not so sore as my thoughts: if, beguiled,

He forgives me, his criminal air

Throws a shade of Llewellyn's despair

For the hound slain for saving his child.