TO A BLACK GIN.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume 1, Issue 13, 28 December 1872, Page 2 (Supplement)

TO A BLACK GIN.

Daughter of Eve, draw near : I would behold thee. Good life ! could ever arm of man enfold thee ? Did the same nature that made Phryne mould thee ? Come thou to leeward ; for thy balmy presence Savoureth not a whit of mille-fleurescence; My nose is no insentient excresence. Thou art not beautiful, I tell thee O thou ungainliest of things gainly, Who thinks thee less than hideous dotes insanely. Most unaesthetical of tilings terrestrial. Hadst thou indeed an origin celestial ? Thy lineaments are positively bestial. Yet thou my sister art, the clergy tell me, Though truth to state, thy brutish looks compel me To hope these parsons merely want to sell me. A hundred times and more I’ve heard and read it, But if St. Paul himself came down and said it, ’ Upon my soul; Qcould not give it credit. “ God’s image cut in ebony,” says some one. “ ’Tis to be hoped some day thou mayst become one.” Thy present image is a very rum one. Thy face, “Thehuman face divine?” Oh Moses! I can’t get over it; which, I suppose, is Because no bridge upon thy sunken nose is. Thy nose appeareth but a transverse section Thy mouth hath no particular direction— A flabby-riinmed abyss of imperfection. Thy skull development mine eye displeases, Thou wilt not suffer much from brain diseases, Thy facial angle forty-five degrees is. The coarseness of thy tresses is distressing, With grease and raddle firmly coalescing ; I cannot laud thy system of “top-dressing.” Thy dress is somewhat scant for proper feeling— As is thy flesh, too —scarce thy bones concealing; Thy calves unquestionably want re-vealing. Thy mangy skin is hideous with tatooing, And legible w’ith hieroglyphic wooing— Sweet things in art of some fierce lover’s doing; For thou some lover hast, I bet a guinea, Some partner in thy fetid ignominy, The “raison detre” of this picaninny. What must he be whose eye thou hast delighted, His sense of beauty hopelessly benighted The canons of his taste how badly sighted! What must his gauge be if thy features pleased him ? If lordship of such limbs as thine appease him It was not “ calf love ” certainly that seized him. And doth he smooth thine hours with oily talking? And take thee conjugally out a-walking? And crown thy transport withoutatomahawking ? I guess his love and anger are combined so, His “passages of love” are “underlined” so. Tell me thy name—What Helen ? Oh CEnonne! That name bequeathed to one So foul and bony, Avengeth well thy ruptured matrimony. Eve’s daughter with that skull and that complexion, What principle of “natural selection” Gave thee with Eve the most remote connection? Sister of L. E. L.—of Mrs. Stowe too— Of E. B. Browning—Harriet Martineau, too, Do theologians know were fibbers go to ? Of dear George Eliot, whom I worship daily— Of Charlotte Bronte and Joanna Bailie— Methinks that theory is rather scaly. Thy primal parents came a period later, The handiwork of some vile imitator; I fear they had the devils “ imprimatur.” This in the retrospect. Now what’s before thee ? The white man s heaven, I fear, would simplv bore thee; 1 " Ten minutes of doxology would floor thee. Thy paradise would be a land of Goshen, M here appetite should be thy sole devotion, And surfeit be the climax of emotion. °f bunya-bunyas towering splendid, Of ‘ sugar bags” every tree suspended, A paradise of sleep and riot blended: Of tons of “ baccy,” and tons more to follow; Of wallaby as much as they could swallow ; Of hollow trees, with possums in the hollow. There, undismayed by frost, or flood, or thunder, As jo; ous as the skies thou roamest under, ’ There shouldst thou—Coo-ey! Stop! She’s off! No wonder. J. BRUNTON STEPHENS, Queensland.