Nothing to Eat. Thomas Chandler Haliburton

, Thomas Chandler Haliburton

      Nothing to Eat

      “I’ll nibble a little at what I have got.”

      —“My appetite’s none of the best.

      And so I must pamper the delicate thing."

      —The least mite will suffice:

      A side bone and dressing and bit of the breast.

      The tip of the rump—that’s it—and one of the fli’s"

      The Argument

         THOUGH famine prevails not at all in the city;

         Though none of starvation have died in the street;

         Yet many there are now exciting our pity,

         Who’re daily complaining of nothing to eat.

         The every-day cry and the every-day fare,

         That’s every day heard where the Livewells are dining,

         Is nothing to eat, or else nothing to wear,

         Which naked and starving rich Merdles are whining.

         There’s Kitty Malone—Mrs. Merdle ‘tis now—

         Was ever on earth here before such a sinner;

         Protesting, excusing and swearing a vow,

         She’d nothing worth eating to give us for dinner.

         Why Kitty, if starving for want of a meal,

         And had’nt a cent in the world to buy meat,

         You wouldn’t exclaim with a more pious zeal,

         “I’m dying of hunger—we’ve nothing to eat!!”

      The Proof—the Queen of Fashion

         The point I advance, if it need confirmation,

         I’ll prove by a witness that few will dispute,

         A pink of perfection and truth in the naion

         Where fashion and folly are all of a suit.

         ‘Tis “Merdle the banker”—or rather his wife,

         Whose fashion, religion, or music, or dress,

         Is followed, consulted, by many through life,

         As pilots are followed by ships in distress;

         For money’s a pilot, a master, a king,

         Which men follow blindly through quicksands and shoals,

         Where pilots their ships in a moment might fling

         To destruction the vessel and cargo and souls.

         ‘Twas money made Kitty of fashion the queen,

         And fortune oft lends queens the scepter;

         So fortune and fashion with this one we’ve seen

         Her money and fortune in fashion has kept her;

         While slaves of the queen with her hoops rules the day,

         Expanding their utmost extent of expansion,

         And mandates of fashion most freely obey,

         And would if it bid all their souls to extinction.

      The Object aimed at

         But what “lady patron” as queen holds the sway;

         Or sweeping, whose hoops in the street are most sweeping;

         The burthen is not of this truth-telling lay,

         That should in its reading the world set to weeping,

         While telling the suff’rings from head to the feet,

         Of poor human beings with nothing to eat.

      What another Poet did

         Another expounder of life’s thorny mazes

         Excited our pity at fortune’s hard fare,

         And troubled the city’s most troublesome places,

         While singing his ditty of “Nothing to Wear.”

         “A tale worth the telling,”’ though I tell for the same,

         Great objects of pity we see in the street,

         “With nothing to wear, though a legion by name,

         Is not to buy clothing, but something to eat.

      How the Author sometimes Dines

         And now by your leave I will try to expound it,

         In truth as it is and the way that I found it.

         My dinner, sometimes, like things transcendental

         And things more substantial, like women and wine

         A thing is, uncertain, and quite accidental,

         And sometimes I wonder, “Oh! where shall I dine?”

         It was when reflecting one evening of late,

         What tavern or hotel or dining-room skinner,

         With table cloth dirty and dirtier plate,

         Would give me a nausea and call it a dinner,

         I met with Jack Merdle, a name fully known

         As good for a million in Stock-gamblers’ Street,

         Where none but a nabob or forger high flown

         With “bulls” or with “bears” need look for a seat.

      Merdle the Banker

         Now Merdle this day having toss’d with his horns

         The bears that were pulling so hard at the stocks,

         And gored every bull that was treading his corns,

         Had lined all his pockets with “plenty of rocks,”

          And home now was driving at “two forty” speed,

         Where dinner was waiting—“a jolly good feed.”

         Himself feeling happy, he knew by my looks,

         A case full of sadness and deep destitution

         Was present in person, not read of in books,

         Appealing in pity for an alms institution.

      Places Where Mortals Dine

         The case, too, was urgent, for there stood a sinner,

         Whose fate hung on chance—a chance for his dinner;

         A chance for all mortals, with truth I assert,

         Who eat where his chance was, to counteract fate,

         “To eat during life each a peck of pure dirt”

          By eating at once the whole peck from one plate.

         For true when I think of the places we eat at,

         Or rather the places by hunger when driven

         We rush in and swallow our bread and our meat at,

         A bushel good measure in life will be given

         To those who are living a “boarding-house life,”

          Or those who are driven by fortune to journey,

         And eat when we must with so dirty a knife,