A Nation-al Appeal

Mrs. Nation,

All creation

Has its eye upon your axe,

For its mighty whacks

And cracks

Have been heard around the world.

You have hurled

Defiance, as well

As a few other things, they tell,

At King Alcohol,

Pinning him to the wall

With your tomahawk.

Bravo! Let ‘em talk

Mrs. Nation; you’re no squaw,

And the law

Has no strings on you,

‘Tis true.

No strings

B’jings!

Come East, young woman; come, come

To Boston. Drink is on the bum,

And we need a Brave

Like you to save

This bean (or has been) stricken city.

Pity

Us, Oh pale face Warrior,

That we be not sorrier

Of this curse.

This is a Lampton verse,

Carrie, or worse,

But it’s to the point,

And thus there ain’t a joint

In town but will tremble

When they read it. Assemble

Yourself. Come East. Lay a plan,

(Do you catch it?)

And we’ll to a man

Hatch it.

Cambridge,

Feb. 24, ‘01

Carrie Amelia Moore Nation (first name also spelled Carry; November 25, 1846 – June 9, 1911) was an American woman who was a radical member of the temperance movement, which opposed alcohol before the advent of Prohibition. She is particularly noteworthy for attacking alcohol-serving establishments (most often taverns) with a hatchet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation

William James Lampton (c1850-1917) William James Lampton was born in the early 1850s in Clark County, Kentucky, and died May 30, 1917. He is buried in the Winchester Cemetery in Clark County. Lampton's father was a brother of Jane Lampton, the mother of Samuel L. Clemens, who is better known as Mark Twain. Early in life, Wm. Lampton worked as a book-keeper in St. Louis before embarking on his career in the newspaper business. He sought advice in a letter to Samuel Clemens in 1875 on how to get into the newspaper business. Clemens advised him "to serve an apprentice-ship for nothing & when worth wages he would get them." He eventually made it into the New York newspaper world. William Lampton was one of the most unique and interesting characters of literary and Bohemian New York from about 1895 to his death in 1917. He had achieved his dream of being a 'newspaper man' and became re-cognized as a celebrated New York journalist and poet. He had a lack of conventionality and a whimsical originality that stood out no less forcibly in his writings than in his daily life. He had little use for "doing the usual thing in the usual sort of way." Much of his poetry could be described as satirical or even as lampoon-ing. He first gained prominence with his book of verse, YAWPS, this was followed by many more books as well as many individually published poems and short stories. His poems were free from convention in technique as well as in spirit, although their chief innovation was simply that as a rule there was no regular number of syllables in a line; he let the lines be any length they wanted to be, to fit the verse or the length of what he had to say. Although familiarly known as "Colonel" Lampton, and although of Kentucky, he was not merely a "Kentucky Colonel" for he was actually appointed Colonel on the staff of the governor of Kentucky. At the time of his death he was about to be made a brigadier-general and was planning to raise a brigade of Kentucky mountaineers for service in the Great War. As he had just struck his stride in short story writing, the loss to literature was even greater than the patriotic loss. Biography by: Robert G. York

from: http://www.amazon.com/Yawps-things-William-Lampton-catalog/dp/B003T9UMAW