Cowboy Love Poem From 1882
Still Has Appeal
Cowboy poetry enthusiasts know Frank Deprez's "Lasca," penned in 1882, as one of the most popular Cowboy Love Poems, that is still enjoyed by many, even today.
Cowboy poetry is poetry by or about cowboys. Its direct origins are from the great cattle drives after the Civil War that brought beef from the isolated West to the populated cities of the North and East. This poetry blossomed as an insider's art form at the height of the cowboy in popular culture, the first half of the twentieth century. In 1985, folklorists from the West first staged a forum for cowboy poetry in Elko, Nevada. This now yearly event, The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, sponsored by the Western Folklife Center, has spawned a grassroots arts revival throughout the American West.
Cowboy poetry is a tradition of working ranch people writing, reciting, publishing, and performing poetry that illuminates the occupational life of herding cattle on horseback. It is most prevalently written in traditional forms–rhyme and meter–with structure inherited from the ballad tradition of Great Britain. However, some of the finest of this contemporary poetry breaks all the rules of the tradition. Cowboys are generally critical of the inauthentic and put a high value on poetic craftsmanship, though the values for appraising the poetry are quite different from modern, academically-based poetics. Every artistic tradition has a murky past marked by high creativity, low self-consciousness, and marginal popularity to outsiders. For cowboy poetry and cowboy lore in general, this past is the trail-drive days of the 1870s and '80s, when the American West still seemed a frontier. This is where the expressive life of the cowboy became legendary.
There are no historic narratives from the trail drives following the Civil War that fully explain the chemistry of an incredibly diverse lot of men brought together, in the wilderness, relying on each other and animals for long and trying odysseys. From this experience came an amazing amalgam of life that forever would identify Americans. It was a jazz of Irish storytelling and lore, Scottish seafaring and cattle tending, Moorish and Spanish horsemanship, European cavalry, African improvisation, and a reluctant observation of Native American survival that can be heard and seen in this way of life, even today.
Starting in the 1880s books of cowboy poems started the trickle out, cowboy novels spread like prairie fire, and, by 1910, cowboy song collections appeared. The cowboy image was set on its own course with music, filmmaking, and literature that, as the years passed, strayed increasingly from the reality of ranch life. Since the poetry and oral storytelling of working cowboys only slightly permeated the popular cowboy stereotype, these insider expressions, for the most part, stayed an insider's art form. The golden age of cowboy poetry roughly runs from the closing of the frontier through the 1950s. The best of cowboy poetry spread widely through ranch country, though access to published material was scant. This poetry has always had two parallel and interacting poetic traditions, one oral where poetry was passed through recitation, and one literary with reading at its core.
LASCA
by
Frank Deprez ( 1882 )
I want free life and I want fresh air;
And I sigh for the canter after the cattle,
The crack of the whips like shots in a battle,
The medley of horns and hoofs and heads
That wars and wrangles and scatters and spreads;
The green beneath and the blue above,
And dash and danger, and life and love --
And Lasca!
Lasca used to ride
On a mouse-gray mustang close by my side,
With blue serape and bright-belled spur;
I laughed with joy as I looked at her!
Little knew she of books or of creeds;
An Ave Maria sufficed her needs;
Little she cared, save to be by my side,
To ride with me, and ever to ride,
From San Saba's shore to LaVaca's tide.
She was as bold as the billows that beat,
She was as wild as the breezes that blow;
From her little head to her little feet
She was swayed in her suppleness to and fro
By each gust of passion; a sapling pine
That grows on the edge of a Kansas bluff
And wars with the wind when the weather is rough
Is like this Lasca, this love of mine.
She would hunger that I might eat,
Would take the bitter and leave me the sweet;
But once, when I made her jealous for fun,
At something I'd whispered, or looked, or done,
One Sunday, in San Antonio,
To a glorious girl in the Alamo,
She drew from her garter a dear little dagger,
And -- sting of a wasp! -- it made me stagger!
An inch to the left, or an inch to the right,
And I shouldn't be maundering here tonight;
But she sobbed, and, sobbing, so swiftly bound
Her torn reboso about the wound,
That I quite forgave her. Scratches don't count
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.
Her eye was brown -- a deep, deep brown;
Her hair was darker than her eye;
And something in her smile and frown,
Curled crimson lip and instep high,
Showed that there ran in each blue vein,
Mixed with the milder Aztec strain,
The vigorous vintage of Old Spain.
She was alive in every limb
With feeling to the finger tips;
And when the sun is like a fire,
And sky one shining, soft sapphire,
One does not drink in little sips.
The air was heavy, and the night was hot,
I sat by her side, and forgot - forgot;
Forgot the herd that were taking their rest,
Forgot that the air was close opprest,
That the Texas norther comes sudden and soon,
In the dead of night or the blaze of noon;
That, once let the herd at its breath take fright,
Nothing on earth can stop the flight;
And woe to the rider, and woe to the steed,
Who falls in front of their mad stampede!
Was that thunder? I grasped the cord
Of my swift mustang without a word.
I sprang to the saddle, and she clung behind.
Away! On a hot chase down the wind!
But never was fox hunt half so hard,
And never was steed so little spared,
For we rode for our lives, You shall hear how we fared
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.
The mustang flew, and we urged him on;
There was one chance left, and you have but one;
Halt, jump to ground, and shoot your horse;
Crouch under his carcass and take your chance;
And, if the steers in their frantic course
Don't batter you both to pieces at once,
You may thank your star; if not, goodby
To the quickening kiss and the long-drawn sigh,
And the open air and the open sky,
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.
The cattle gained on us, and just as I felt
For my old six-shooter behind in my belt,
Down came the mustang, and down came we,
Clinging together -- and, what was the rest?
A body that spread itself on my brest,
Two arms that shielded my dizzy head,
Two lips that hard on my lips were prest;
Then came thunder in my ears,
As over us surged the sea of steers,
Blows that beat blood into my eyes,
And when I could rise--
Lasca was dead!
I gouged out a grave a few feet deep,
And there in Earth's arms I laid her to sleep;
And there she is lying, and no one knows;
And the summer shines and the winter snows;
For many a day the flowers have spread
A pall of petals over her head;
And the little gray hawk hangs aloft in the air,
And the sly coyote trots here and there,
And the black snake glides and glitters and slides
Into a rift in a cottonwood tree;
And the buzzard sails on,
And comes and is gone,
Stately and still like a ship at sea.
And I wonder why I do not care
For the things that are like the things that were.
Does half my heart lie buried there
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande?
_______
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