le of rum!

Fifteen men all stark and cold--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Their eyes popp'd wide and glazed and bold--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
The skipper lay with his nob in gore
Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore,
And the scullion he was stabbed times four.
And there they lay,
And the soggy skies
Rained all day long
On the staring eyes--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men of the Vixen's list--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
All gone down from the devil's own fist--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
We wrapped 'em all in a mainsail's fold,
We sewed at the foot a bit of gold,
And we heaved 'em into the billows cold.
The bit was put
As snug's could be,
Where't ne'er will bother
You nor me--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

This is the requiem of the Fifteen Dead Men that Eugene Cowles would sing
so effectively in his booming bass after rehearsals of "The Ogallallas." It
must have been great!

Allison felt that he had done little justice to an idea full of great
possibilities and made a number of revisions during the polishing process
until it was raised to five verses. I have the original manuscript[5] of
the first revision of "A Piratical Ballad" unearthed from a cubby-hole in
an old desk of his to which I fell heir, the only change being in the title
to "A Ballad of Dead Men," the elimination of one of the concluding lines
"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" from the refrain of each verse, (it had been
added originally to fit the musical cadence), and the strengthening of the
final verse by the substitution of--

With willing hearts
And a Yo-heave-ho
Over the side
To the sharks below.

[5] Reproduced in facsimile.

Many will no doubt recall "The Philosophy of Composition"[6] by Edgar Allen
Poe, and those who by some mischance have missed it, can spend a delightful
hour in the perusal of what, beyond the least doubt, is the most skillful
analysis of poetic composition ever written, even though it fails to carry
conviction that "The Raven" was ever produced by the formula described. Poe
declared that--

... most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood
that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic
intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the pu