If Young Allison is vain of anything he has done I have yet to hear such an expression from him. He just writes things and tucks them away in odd corners and it has devolved upon me to collect them and keep them. So it is that, while not a literary executor—because Allison, thank God, is scandalously healthy and I am making no professions—it falls to my satisfied lot to be a literary collector in a certain sense—if he who gathers and preserves and gloats over the brain products of others may thus be described. That is why, treasured among my earthly possessions—scant enough, the good Lord knows, but full of joy and satisfaction to me—are extensive lead-pencil manuscript memoranda in Allison’s writing showing the painstaking stages by which “Fifteen Dead Men,” characterized by James Whitcomb Riley as that “masterly and exquisite ballad of delicious horrificness,” reached its perfection. Under whatever name it may be sung, be it “The Ballad of Dead Men,” or “On Board the Derelict” or “Derelict,” it is a poem big enough to fix the Jewel of Fame firmly over the author’s brow.

Away back in the Allison strain somewhere must have been a bold buccaneer, for who else but the descendant of a roystering, fighting, blood-letting pirate could have seen the “scuppers glut with a rotting red?” Through all the visible mildness of his deep and complex nature there surely runs a blood-thirsty current, in proof of which I submit this single paragraph from certain confessions† † The Delicious Vice. Pages 23-24. First Series, 1907. of his:

So it is, naturally enough, that to Allison, “Treasure Island” is the ne plus ultra and composite of all pirate stories, and this marvel of delight he called to Waller’s attention while they were incubating “The Ogallallas.” No sooner had Waller read it than the quatrain of Old Billy Bones took possession of him and converted itself into music. The two of them, as so many other thousands had done, bewailed the parsimony of Stevenson in the use and development of the grisly suggestion and Waller declared that if Allison would complete the verse he would set it to music. That same night Allison composed three ragged but promising verses, at white heat, while walking the floor in a cloud of tobacco smoke of his own making. Next morning he gave them to Waller, who by night had the score and words married and a day later the finished product went forward to Wm. A. Pond & Co., and was published under the title of “A Piratical Ballad”† † A Piratical Ballad. Song for Bass or Deep Baritone. Words by Young E. Allison; Music by Henry Waller; New York. Published by William A. Pond & Co. Copyright 1891. [See pages 65-68.]. Note that these initial verses are described as “ragged” and in this I am also quoting Allison himself who in our various chats on his reminiscence of “Treasure Island” has often given them this characterization. Be that as it may these three verses were the foundation for the perfect six that were to emerge after several years more of intermittent but patient development and labor.

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† † Reproduced in facsimile. 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—

Many will no doubt recall “The Philosophy of Composition”† † Stone & Kimball Edition. Vol. 6; page 31. 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—

And so he proceeds to detail how he composed “The Raven.” First he decided on a length of about one hundred lines that could be read at one sitting; on beauty as its province; on sadness as its tone; on a variation of the application of the refrain—it remaining for the most part unvaried—to obtain what he termed “artistic piquancy;” proceeding only at that stage to the composition of the last verse as the first step. All this of course has little to do with “Derelict” and yet I cannot but see a sort of analogy of effect by processes wholly divergent, particularly as Allison once told me that the central idea of the last verse for consigning the bodies to the deep was ever in his mind and that this verse was first projected, although its development was the most difficult and its perfection did not come until later. So much for that! In the five verses he had arrived approximately at a consummation of the sea burial, the introduction very properly repeating the quatrain of Billy Bones before concluding:

While this composition is fine and tight as a drum in poetic meter and conception, the real perfection was not arrived at until he made it “Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell.” In the five-verse revision a part of the last verse as it appeared in “A Piratical Ballad” went into the second, a part of the second verse was shifted to the third and a fourth was added to give an implied reason for the riot of death in an inferred quarrel over the “chest on chest full of Spanish gold, with a ton of plate in the middle hold.” Strangely enough all these shifts and additions do not appear to have altered the sentiment in the least and at times I am amazed, in reading over old versions, that I do not appreciably miss certain lines and ideas that seem vital to the finished product.

Shortly after the five verses had been privately printed for his friends on a single slip, Allison conceived the rather daring idea of injecting the trace of a woman on board the Derelict which up to this time he had very closely developed in the Stevensonian spirit. While there was no woman in “Treasure Island,” he proved to himself by analysis that his new thought would do no violence to Stevenson’s idea, because Billy Bones’ song was a reminiscence of his own past and not of Treasure Island. Hence the trace of a woman, skillfully injected, might be permissible. Here, too, his analysis gave him the melancholy tone—of which Poe speaks as so highly desirable—greatly accentuated by doubt of whether she was “wench” or “maid,” and a further possible incentive for the extermination of the whole ship’s list. This verse† † Reproduced in facsimile. has undergone little change since the woman trace was first injected:

There were certain niceties of word adjustment to follow as for instance the substitution of “a thin dirk-slot” for “a dagger-slot,” the word “thin” carrying a keen mental impression of a snaky, hissing sound-sensation as the idea unfolded of the dirk slipping through the flimsy fabric of the shift, cast on the bunker cot to remain the silent evidence of the tragedy. The very acme of touches came in the punctuation† † Reproduced in facsimile. of the concluding lines—pauses that emphasize with so much ingenuity the very question that lends the speculatively mournful cadence to the whole:

And as a cap-sheaf came the thought of differentiating the whole verse† † Reproduced in facsimile. by an Italicized setting! That is almost the last word of the conception of poet-printer.

The dogged persistency that Allison applied to the completion of this masterpiece has always won my deepest admiration. And the admiration of many others too, for this poem, first publicly printed in the Louisville Courier-Journal, has been reprinted in one form or another, in almost every newspaper in the country and has an honored place in many scrap books. What great and painstaking effort was encompassed in its composition only one can know even partly who has been privileged to “peep behind the scenes” at the “properties of the literary histrio”—the manuscript notes and memoranda, a few of which accompany this volume in facsimile.