Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2009 Issue
A Few Rhymes for the Carrier Boys
An opportunity for erudition
Today newspapers are cutting back. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News recently announced they are reducing home delivery to three days a week. That provides perspective on that moment on January 1st, 1869 when all the world looked open. It now gives way to an era of consolidation and closure where newspapers fight to live long enough to mutate into electronic publications with advertising and subscription formulas that support the reporting, analysis and news gathering we have, these past one hundred and forty years, come to rely on. It's a very different world we live in today.
Now, for those who wish a go at the ancient prose of this "Few Rhymes" we provide the first and last pages [of 7] that you may breath deeply of these memories, sense the day - January 1, 1869 and do what few if any souls did that day - read the piece.
A Few Rhymes
By the
Carrier Boys
Of the
Salem Register,
And by them presented,
With the compliments of the Season
To their Patrons, January 1, 1869
Another year, kind friends, hath come and gone;
Another wave of Time hath drifted on
Into the shoreless waters, spreading grand, and vast, -
The Dim, mysterious ocean of the Past -
Bearing all things, of evil and good,
Upon the bosom of the rushing flood.
Now, standing on the shore, good friends, this gladsome day,
We stop, and look afar on either way: -
Back, with sad retrospects of the past,
On faded joys too beautiful to last;
On happy days that fled, alas! A precious boon;
On works and deeds regretted soon as done;
On acts committed, better ne'er begun;
Yet, from the past, and from the devious ways,
We gather wisdom for the coming days;
Learn from experience, till the victory's won
The good to imitate, the evil to shun.
The final page concludes -
But here we halt, for our broken muse,
Rearing and plunging, has kicked off his shoes,
And now stands snorting and completely blown,
While we, who came within an inch of being thrown,
Must take a brick and rub our poor back-bone.
Our Rosinante is an antique roan,
And troubled with the springhalt, wind and stone.
And makes a sorry pacer, as we think we've shown;
And that's the very reason our remarks, in tone,
And sometimes very flat and sometimes quite high flown,
The truth is, standing all the year alone.
And dragged out in December, he will kick and groan,
But please don't pick us as you would a bone.
We're full of faults and imperfections we will own;
But are there any perfect? And we answer none,
And no man lives but should confess before God's throne.
We here to beg leave to say, if faults of speech or press,
To any one occasion much distress,
We'll fix it up all right in the next year's Address.
The American Antiquarian Society has a very nice collection of Carrier Calls that suggests some newspapers published a call every year while other newspapers apparently never did.
