This one obviously wasn't intended to be sung, but may be interesting nevertheless.

From The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, New York: The Century Co., Vol. LXXXVI, No. 1, May, 1913, page 43:


TO THE EXPERIMENTERS
By Charles Badger Clark, Jr.

Help me live long, O keen, cool servants of science!
Give me a hundred years, for life is good and I love it,
And wonders are easy for you.
Yet, by a rule that is older than Æsculapius,
I still must reckon my time to that luckless day
When a 'whelming foe will cross a frontier unguarded
Into this myriad nation of cells that bears my name,
Storming fort after fort till the swarming defenders have perished
And the strangled empire shall fall.
My friends, simple folk, will weep and say, "He is dead!"
But you will smile at their terrible, black-winged angel,
And jot his name and description down in your note-book—
The bitter song of the ages in a line of chemic formula!
Aye, and perchance you can take the components of living,—
Provinces, ravaged and waste, of that ruinous empire,—
And cunningly right them again.
Then call in the mourners.
"Say you your friend is dead?
See through that glass how his heart is pulsating steadily.
Look there, and there, at the beautiful play of the organs—
All the reactions of life restored by our science!
Where is your death?"
But I—is there not an I?—catch you that in a test-tube!