Remonstrance with the Snails

Anonymous

YE little snails,

With slippery tails,

Who noiselessly travel

Along this gravel,

By a silvery path of slime unsightly,

I learn that you visit my pea-rows nightly.

Felonious your visit, I guess!

And I give you this warning,

That, every morning,

I ’ll strictly examine the pods;

And if one I hit on,

With slaver or spit on,

Your next meal will be with the gods.

I own you ’re a very ancient race,

And Greece and Babylon were amid;

You have tenanted many a royal dome,

And dwelt in the oldest pyramid;

The source of the Nile!—O, you have been there!

In the ark was your floodless bed;

On the moonless night of Marathon

You crawled o’er the mighty dead;

But still, though I reverence your ancestries,

I don’t see why you should nibble my peas.

The meadows are yours,—the hedgerow and brook,

You may bathe in their dews at morn;

By the agèd sea you may sound your shells,

On the mountains erect your horn;

The fruits and the flowers are your rightful dowers.

Then why—in the name of wonder—

Should my six pea-rows be the only cause

To excite your midnight plunder?

I have never disturbed your slender shells;

You have hung round my agèd walk;

And each might have sat, till he died in his fat,

Beneath his own cabbage-stalk:

But now you must fly from the soil of your sires;

Then put on your liveliest crawl,

And think of your poor little snails at home,

Now orphans or emigrants all.

Utensils domestic and civil and social

I give you an evening to pack up;

But if the moon of this night does not rise on your flight,

To-morrow I ’ll hang each man Jack up.

You ’ll think of my peas and your thievish tricks,

With tears of slime, when crossing the Styx.