Pestilence
Hot, dry winds forever blowing,
Dead men to the grave-yards going:
Constant hearses,
Funeral verses;
Oh! what plagues—there is no knowing!
Priests retreating from their pulpits!—
Some in caves, and some in cole-pits
Snugly hiding,
There abiding
’Till the town is rid of culprits.
Doctors raving and disputing,
Death's pale army still recruiting—
What a pother
One with t'other!
Some a-writing, some a-shooting.
Nature's poisons here collected,
Water, earth, and air infected—
O, what pity,
Such a City,
Was in such a place erected!
This poem is in the public domain.
This poem refers to a plague of yellow fever that struck Philadelphia in August 1793.
Philip Freneau
Born in New York City and raised in Monmouth Country, New Jersey, Philip Morin Freneau graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1771; at the college commencement, his friend Hugh Henry Breckenridge read The Rising Glory of America, a poem on which the two had collaborated. While working for a short time as a schoolteacher in Long Island, Freneau published anti-British satirical verses. He spent two years as secretary to a planter on St. Croix.