This is the requiem of the Fifteen Dead Men that Eugene Cowles would sing so effectively in his booming bass after rehearsals of "The Ogallallas." It must have been great! Allison felt that he had done little justice to an idea full of great possibilities and made a number of revisions during the polishing process until it was raised to five verses. I have the original manuscript[5] of the first revision of "A Piratical Ballad" unearthed from a cubby-hole in an old desk of his to which I fell heir, the only change being in the title to "A Ballad of Dead Men," the elimination of one of the concluding lines "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" from the refrain of each verse, (it had been added originally to fit the musical cadence), and the strengthening of the final verse by the substitution of-- With willing hearts And a Yo-heave-ho Over the side To the sharks below. [5] Reproduced in facsimile. Many will no doubt recall "The Philosophy of Composition"[6] by Edgar Allen Poe, and those who by some mischance have missed it, can spend a delightful hour in the perusal of what, beyond the least doubt, is the most skillful analysis of poetic composition ever written, even though it fails to carry conviction that "The Raven" was ever produced by the formula described. Poe declared that-- ... most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded as unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the painful erasions and interpolations--in a word at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene shifting, the step ladders and demon traps, the cock's feather, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histrio_. [6] Stone & Kimball Edition. Vol. 6; page 31.