2015 September 18: "Old Ironsides"

I have often told of my fondness of the book to the left, The Standard Book of British and American Verse, Selected by Nella Braddy, A.B., Editor of University Library, Master Classics, Garden City Publishing Co., Inc, Garden City, New York, 1932.  My grandmother, Agnes Laura Keys Sigford gave it to my mother, Ruth Evangeline Sigford McPherson on her 26th birthday.  I don't know that my mother ever spent much time read the poetry in this book, but she was instrumental in prompting me to spend hours quoting passages from this book.  I was eleven years old when she received this book of poetry.  As the oldest, by five years, the job of washing the dinner dishes was mine.  As many eleven year olds, I thought this highly unfair.  I whined, thrashed and generally made myself quite unbearable.  One day, mother brought out the book of poetry and propped it up in the window above the kitchen sink.

She told me how her mother made her learn the poem, "Old Ironsides" when she was in about the 5th grade at Mills School in Klamath Falls.  My mother was embarrassed when my grandmother took her around, or at least accompanied her and her teacher, to room by room in the school to recite the poem. My grandmother learned the poem, herself, about the turn of the twentieth century,while she was attending school in Corvallis, where she was sent for her high school education.  Mitchell, Oregon, in remote eastern Oregon, did not have much to offer in the way of higher education, and her teacher in Mitchell talked her father into sending her to Corvallis where she could get a high school education.

So with mother's prompting, I learned many poems and was one of the slowest of dishwashers, as I emoted and only a pre-teen can. The first poem that I learned was Oliver Wendall Holmes' stirring words written with reference of the proposed breaking up and scrapping  the  famous U. S. Frigate, "Constitution."  A few years later, I also won a country contest with my recitation of the poem.  I have never forgotten the lines that I memorized while doing dishes.  Many years later, my children just thought I was weird when I would launch into the poem whilst driving  -- or doing dishes, but my grandchildren seemed to have listened more as they too can recite some of those stirring lines -- and they didn't even have to do dishes to learn the words.

My two older grandchildren surprised my mother, their great-grandmother,  on her eightieth birthday, and brought tears to her  eyes with their rap-rendition of "Old Ironsides."    My grandson was going to present the rap solo, but his younger sister joined in at the last minute.

"How did you know the words," asked my daughter of her nine-old daughter.

"Oh, we just learned it.   Gram always did the poem while we were driving to swimming or the lake or places," answered my granddaughter.

These words have been part of our family's history for over a century.  The last time that I publicly  gave voice to those words of my childhood was at the funeral of my mother.  The words seemed fitting on that day.

 "Old Ironsides"

By Oliver Wendall Holmes

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle-shout,

And burst the cannon's roar;

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck once red with heroes' blood,

Where knelt the vanquished foe,

When winds were hurrying o'er the flood

And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor's tread,

Or know the conquered knee;  

The harpies of the shore shall pluck

The eagle of the sea!

O better that her shattered hulk 

should sink beneath the wave!

Her thunders shook the might deep,

And there should be her grave;

Nail to her mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,

The lightening and the gale.

When I was younger, I often wished that a Shakespeare sonnet would have been learned whilst doing dishes.  It would have been easier to work into conversations or to explain why my heart beat in time with those words.  Now, when on a long drive, or just by myself in the car, or walking with my dog,  those words come unbidden to me and resonate deep within my being  -- and Shakespeare pales to me.

    ~ ~ ~ 

© Joan G. Hill, Roots'n'Leaves Publications