Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DUTCHMAN'S QUIRK, by ARTHUR GUITERMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DUTCHMAN'S QUIRK, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Broadway reaches northward from fair bowling
Last Line: "is, just as I've shown you, a ""dutchman's quirk!"
Subject(s): New York City; Manhattan; New York, New York; The Big Apple


BROADWAY reaches northward from fair Bowling Green
Direct as an arrow-flight, flexureless, clean
And certain of line
As the trunk of a pine
(And would that a rod of its frontage were mine!)
Quite suddenly then,
At the street numbered "Ten,"
Above a great warehouse of laces and shawls,
Just south of a chapel with gray Gothic walls,
It leaps to the west
Like a roadway possessed!
In flagrant defiance
Of Reason and Science,
Macadam and Telford and Byrne, and the laws
Of wise Roman roadmakers.... Hear ye the cause!

Old Hendrick Brevoort, in -- what matters the date?
In days that are gone, held a goodly estate --
A "bouwerie" termed in the speech of the Dutch
(His neighbors were Stuyvesants, Banckers, and such);
And there with the hoardings of toil and frugality,
Lived at his ease and dispensed hospitality.
With head in the heavens, deep-rooted in earth,
A tulip-tree, mighty of burgeon and girth,
So stately and proud,
Wide-branching, great-boughed,
O'ershadowed his lawn with an emerald cloud.
'Twas Hendrick's delight in the cool of its bower
To smoke and to ponder from hour to hour
With tankard at knee;
"For, truly," said he,
"Of all friends, the very best friend is my tree
That never provokes me and never deceives,
But echoes my thoughts with the sigh of its leaves."

The Mayor and Council had sanctioned a plan
To straighten the roadways that rambled and ran
Cross-hatching our isle
In a wonderful style --
(Those happy old lanes!) -- so they summoned a file
Of axmen with axes and chainmen with chains
And hardy surveyors of mountains and plains
And gave them instructions,
In spite of all ructions,
To follow the chart
Nor ever depart
A hair from its guidance; regardless of mart
Or hovel or mansion, to hew out the way;
Whatever the damage, the city would pay.
Forth sailed that trigonometrical band
To further the work that the Fathers had planned;
And strictly obeying
The rules of surveying,
Invested with powers that challenged gainsaying,
They carried the roadway o'er high land and low,
Direct as the flight of a bee or a crow,
O'er meadow and lot,
Through palace and cot,
By scenes that were seemly (by wiles that were not),
Through acres of flowers
And bird-haunted covers
And byways and bowers
Once sacred to lovers,
Though housewives defended beleagured dominions
Or voiced from their doorways unfettered opinions
Of levels and transits and government minions --
Though cattle protested from buffeted sheds,
Though turnips and cabbages rained on their heads,
Though farmer boys fought them,
Though maidens besought them,
They followed their map, undismayed, till it brought them
To Hendrick Brevoort at the foot of his tree....
What! Yield up his friend to the axman? Not he!
He called out his neighbors, the Blauvelts, the Raynors;
They stirred up their vassals and sturdy retainers,
Their tenants and servants, white, yellow, and black --
Dirck, Chuffee, and Hubert, Claes, Mingo, and Jack --
Both merry young springalds and crusty curmudgeons
With ax-helves and pitchforks and scythe-blades
and bludgeons,
Resolved to defend
To the bitterest end
The right of a Dutchman to stand by his friend!

The Knights of the Sextant yet sought to prevail
With promise of riches or threat of the jail;
But, finding old Hendrick perverse or obtuse,
They drew off their army and patched up a truce.
Brevoort left the tree in the keep of his horde
To make good in law what he held by the sword.
He called on the Mayor,
The City Surveyor,
The Coroner, Marshal, and every taxpayer
Of substance or influence, urging his plea
Of "Woodman, oh, woodman, don't fool with that tree!"

Sing hey! for the hard-headed man with a whim!
The plan of a city was altered for him!
The highway led straight
To Hendrick's estate,
Then gallantly swerved
And gracefully curved
Away to the westward.... The tree was preserved!
(To chuckle, no doubt,
At the numberless rout
Of mortals his Majesty made to turn out.)

When up through the canon entitled "Broadway"
You're riding on business or pleasure to-day,
And suddenly, close to the front of Grace Church,
The car takes a curve with a jolt and a lurch
That loosens, mayhap,
Your hold on a strap
And drops you quite neatly in somebody's lap,
Remember, the cause of that shameful jerk
Is, just as I've shown you, a "Dutchman's Quirk!"





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