THE BEE IN THE TAR BARREL

[WRITTEN IN 1831]

I heard a bee, on a summer day,

Brisk and busy, and ripe for quarrel-

Bustling, and buzzing, and bouncing away,

In the fragrant depth of an old tar-barrel.

Do you ask what his buzzing was all about?

Oh, he was wondrous shrewd and critical:

’Twas sport to hear him scold and flout,

And the topics he chose were all political.

And first and foremost he buzzed of tar,

And called the heads of the government asses,

To let it be carried off so far,

And changed, at Trinidad, for molasses.

For we got the West India trade too soon

From the British folks- he had not a doubt of it;

For himself, he’d have scorned the thing "as a boon,"

But kept at work till he cheated them out of it.

Then plaintive and piteous his humming grew,

And I thought him complaining of indigestion;

But I listened again, and at length I knew

He had got upon the Indian question.

The world, he declared, would all look glum,

To see us coax the Cherokee nation

From their fathers’ graves, from the whites and rum,

Their pockets lined with a compensation.

Next, tones of fury and wrath were heard-

And I started back with sudden wonder;

For the staves were shaken, the hoops were jarred,

And it seemed the barrel was filled with thunder.

"’Twas a crime to fill the land with groans,

’Twas a deed," he said, "most foul and ugly,

To turn our poor unfortunate drones

From the public hive, where they lodged so snugly."

And next- but I started at the sound

Of noses blown and people walking;

And I saw some thirty Nationals round,

And found I had dozed while Ketchum was talking.