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A perch, who had the toothache, once
Thus moaned, like any human dunce:
" Why must great souls exhaust so soon
Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ?
Existence on such sculpin terms,
Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms,
What is it all but dross to me,
Whose nature craves a larger sea;
Whose inches, six: from head to tail,
Enclose the spirit of a whale ;
Who, if great baits were still to win,
By watchful eye and fearless fin
Might with the Zodiac's awful twain
Room for a third immortal gain ?
Better the crowd's unthinking plan,
The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan!
O Death, thou ever roaming shark,
Engulf me in eternal dark!"
The speech was cut in two by flight:
A real shark had come in sight;
No metaphoric monster, one
It soothes despair to call upon,
But stealthy, sidelong, grim, i-wis,
A bit of downright Nemesis;
While it recovered from the shock,
Our fish took shelter 'neath a. rock:
This was an ancient lobster's house,
A lobster of prodigious nous,
So old that barnacles had spread
Their white encampment o'er his head,
And of experience so stupend,
His claws were blunted at the end,
Turning life's iron pages o'er,
That shut and can be oped no more.
Stretching a. hospitable claw,
At once," said he, "the point I saw;
My dear yonng friend, your case I rue,
Your great-great-grandfather I knew;
He was a, tried and tender friend
I know, -- I ate him in the end:
In this vile sea a pilgrim long,
Still my sight's good, my memory strong;
The only sign that age is near
Is a slight deafness in this ear;
I understand your case as well
As this my old familiar shell;
This Welt-schmerz is a brand-new notion,
Come in since first I knew the ocean;
We had no radicals, nor crimes,
Nor lobster-pots, in good old times;
Your traps and nets and hooks we owe
To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co.;
I say to all my sons and daughters,
Shun Red Republican hot waters;
No lobster ever cast his lot
Among the reds, but went to pot:
Your trouble's in the jaw, you said?
Come, let me just nip off your head,
And, when a new one comes, the pain
Will never trouble you again:
Nay, nay, fear naught: 't is nature's law.
Four times I've lost this starboard claw;
And still, erelong, another grew,
Good as the old, - and better too! "
The perch consented, and next day
An osprey, marketing that way,
Picked up a fish without a bead,
Floating with belly up, stone dead.
Moral
Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws,
And sauce for goose is gander's sauce;
But perch's heads aren't lobster's claws.
The Lobster - Doctor was written in 1853. Perhaps Dr. Lowell saw too well the dependence of the public on those of the medical profession and the charlatans who offered "cures" for the ailments of the day. Certainly in dentistry, the profession had little to offer other than removal of the offending tooth.
Or perhaps through the glass darkly, he saw the gathering storms of war and placed a jab at the Republicans (and honest Abe). I rather doubt this as he was a stanch abolitionist and wrote much of the Civil War.
And then, maybe Lowell was just acknowledging the dependence of those who live in schools and are defenseless against the sharks in the world, but fall prey to those "who only wanted to help".
Speculate as you like, but James Russell Lowell was a well versed writer whose major shortcoming was that he spilled so many thoughts on a page that you sometimes can't see the forest for the trees.
This particular poem was contained within a diary of a trip to a lake in Maine. (after Maine became a state free of Massachusetts.) He offered a bit of droll humor as he recorded a conversation with a man working at a sawmill. He asked the worker if he had been to see the "old man of the mountain", which drew the response, no. And Lowell felt rather smug about the yokels not knowing much about what was about. Then between cuts of the log to yield slabs the man asked if he was from Baws'n. Lowell responded, yes. The man asked if he went to Bunker Hill often. To which Lowell had to reply, no. With this he recognized that sharp wits are not the sole property of the educated.
Alas, the old man of the mountain is no more. On the third of May or perhaps a day or so earlier, the face of the mountain fell, erasing the image of an old man face. T'was the third of May 2003.
Lowell's Works, A Moosehead Journal, Riverside Press, 1892, James Russell Lowell, vol. 1, p 1.
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