The Project Gutenberg eBook of The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language

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Title: The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language

Author: Vachel Lindsay

Release date: February 7, 2023 [eBook #69969]
Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Macmillan Company, 1920

Credits: D A Alexander, Krista Zaleski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA, AND OTHER RHYMES IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE ***

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

AND OTHER RHYMES IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

LIST OF THE BOOKS OF VACHEL LINDSAY

Prose:

A Handy Guide for Beggars

Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty

The Art of the Moving Picture

Verse:

General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems

The Congo and Other Poems

The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems

The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language

It is suggested that those who are interested in a complete view of these works should take them in the above order. They are all published by The Macmillan Company.

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

AND OTHER RHYMES IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

BY
VACHEL LINDSAY

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

TO

ISADORA BENNETT,
CITIZEN OF SPRINGFIELD,

because she helped me to write many of
the pieces, from the Golden Whales
of California to Alexander Campbell,
and because she danced
the Daniel Jazz.

For permission to reprint some of the verses in this volume the author is indebted to the courtesy of the editors and publishers of The Chicago Daily News, Poetry (Chicago), Contemporary Verse, The New Republic, The Forum, Books and the Book World of the New York Sun, Others, The Red Cross Magazine, Youth, The Independent, and William Stanley Braithwaite’s anthology entitled “Victory.”

[Pg ix]

	PAGE
A Word on California, Photoplays, and Saint Francis	xiii
FIRST SECTION
THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES
The Golden Whales of California	3
Kalamazoo	11
John L. Sullivan, the Strong Boy of Boston	14
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan	18
Rameses II	31
Moses	32
A Rhyme for All Zionists	33
A Meditation on the Sun	38
Dante	42
The Comet of Prophecy	43
Shantung, or the Empire of China Is Crumbling Down	46
The Last Song of Lucifer	59
SECOND SECTION
A RHYMED SCENARIO, SOME POEM GAMES, AND THE LIKE
A Doll’s “Arabian Nights”	71
The Lame Boy and the Fairy	77
The Blacksmith’s Serenade	83
The Apple Blossom Snow Blues	87
The Daniel Jazz	91[Pg x]
When Peter Jackson Preached in the Old Church	95
The Conscientious Deacon	97
Davy Jones’ Door-Bell	99
The Sea Serpent Chantey	101
The Little Turtle	104
THIRD SECTION
COBWEBS AND CABLES
The Scientific Aspiration	107
The Visit to Mab	108
The Song of the Sturdy Snails	110
Another Word on the Scientific Aspiration	113
Dancing for a Prize	114
Cold Sunbeams	116
For All Who Ever Sent Lace Valentines	117
My Lady Is Compared to a Young Tree	120
To Eve, Man’s Dream of Wifehood, as Described by Milton	121
A Kind of Scorn	123
Harps in Heaven	125
The Celestial Circus	126
The Fire-Laddie, Love	128
FOURTH SECTION
RHYMES CONCERNING THE LATE WORLD WAR, AND THE NEXT WAR
In Memory of My Friend Joyce Kilmer, Poet and Soldier	133
The Tiger on Parade	136
The Fever Called War	137
Stanzas in Just the Right Tone for the Spirited Gentleman Who Would Conquer Mexico	138
The Modest Jazz-Bird	140[Pg xi]
The Statue of Old Andrew Jackson	144
Sew the Flags Together	146
Justinian	149
The Voice of St. Francis of Assisi	150
In Which Roosevelt Is Compared to Saul	151
Hail to the Sons of Roosevelt	153
The Spacious Days of Roosevelt	155
FIFTH SECTION
RHYMES OF THE MIDDLE WEST AND SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS
When the Mississippi Flowed in Indiana	159
The Fairy from the Apple-Seed	161
A Hot Time in the Old Town	163
The Dream of All of the Springfield Writers	166
The Springfield of the Far Future	168
After Reading the Sad Story of the Fall of Babylon	170
Alexander Campbell	172

[Pg xiii]

A WORD ON CALIFORNIA, PHOTOPLAYS, AND SAINT FRANCIS

In The Art of the Moving Picture, in the chapter on California and America, I said, in part:

“The moving picture captains of industry, like the California gold finders of 1849, making colossal fortunes in two or three years, have the same glorious irresponsibility and occasional need of the sheriff. They are Californians more literally than this. Around Los Angeles the greatest and most characteristic moving picture colonies are built. Each photoplay magazine has its California letter, telling of the putting up of new studios, and the transfer of actors with much slap-you-on-the-back personal gossip.

“... Every type of the photoplay but the intimate is founded on some phase of the out-of doors. Being thus dependent, the plant can best be set up where there is no winter. Besides this, the Los Angeles region has the sea, the mountains, the desert, and many kinds of grove and field....

“If the photoplay is the consistent utterance of its scenes, if the actors are incarnations of the land they[Pg xiv] walk upon, as they should be, California indeed stands a chance to achieve through the films an utterance of her own. Will this land, furthest west, be the first to capture the inner spirit of this newest and most curious of the arts?...

“People who revere the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 have often wished those gentlemen had moored their bark in the region of Los Angeles, rather than Plymouth Rock, that Boston had been founded there. At last that landing is achieved.

“Patriotic art students have discussed with mingled irony and admiration the Boston domination of the only American culture of the nineteenth century, namely, literature. Indianapolis has had her day since then. Chicago is lifting her head. Nevertheless Boston still controls the text book in English, and dominates our high schools. Ironic feelings in this matter, on the part of western men, are based somewhat on envy and illegitimate cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest hope of a healthful rivalry. They want new romanticists and artists as indigenous to their soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem, or Longfellow to the chestnuts of his native heath. Whatever may be said of the patriarchs, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bronson Alcott, they were true sons[Pg xv] of the New England stone fences and meeting houses. They could not have been born or nurtured anywhere else on the face of the earth.

“Some of us view with a peculiar thrill the prospect that Los Angeles may become the Boston of the photoplay. Perhaps it would be better to say the Florence, because California reminds one of colorful Italy, more than of any part of the United States. Yet there is a difference.

“The present day man-in-the-street, man-about-town Californian has an obvious magnificence about him that is allied to the eucalyptus tree, the pomegranate....

“The enemy of California says the state is magnificent, but thin. He declares it is as though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian piece of gilt paper, and he who dampens his finger and thrusts it through finds an alkali valley on the other side, the lonely prickly pear, and a heap of ashes from a deserted camp-fire. He says the citizens of this state lack the richness of an æsthetic and religious tradition. He says there is no substitute for time. But even these things make for coincidence. This apparent thinness California has in common with the routine photoplay, which is at times as shallow in its thought as the shadow it throws upon[Pg xvi] the screen. This newness California has in common with all photoplays. It is thrillingly possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual tradition and depth together.

“Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many acres of land. “Good” Californians count their mines and enumerate their palm trees. They count the miles of their sea-coast, and the acres under cultivation and the height of the peaks, and revel in large statistics and the bigness generally, and forget how a few men rattle around in a great deal of scenery. They shout the statistics across the Rockies and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi valley is non-existent to the Californian. His fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast line. Through the geographical accident of separation by mountain and desert from the rest of the country, he becomes a mere shouter, hurrahing so assiduously that all variety in the voice is lost. Then he tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo.

“These are the defects of the motion picture qualities. Also its panoramic tendency runs wild. As an institution it advertises itself with a sweeping gesture. It has the same passion for coast-line. These are not[Pg xvii] the sins of New England. When, in the hands of masters, they become sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those of New England....

“When the Californian relegates the dramatic to secondary scenes, both in his life and his photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic and lyric, he and this instrument may find their immortality together as New England found its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon tide of Spring comes into California, through all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms the lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest garden is a jewelled pathway of wonder. But the Californian cannot shout ‘orange blossoms, orange blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope.’ He cannot boom forth ‘roseleaves, roseleaves’ so that he does their beauties justice. Here is where the photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance. And he can go on into stranger things, and evolve all the Splendor Films into higher types, for the very name of California is splendor.... The California photoplaywright can base his Crowd Picture upon the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco. He can derive his Patriotic and Religious Splendors from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely: the groves of the giant redwoods.

[Pg xviii]

“The campaigns for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west coast, where, with the slightest care, grow up models for all the world of plant arrangement and tree-luxury. Our mechanical east is reproved, our tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged, every time we look upon those garden-paths and forests.

“It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our national text book in art, as Boston appropriated to herself the guardianship of the national text book of literature. If California has a shining soul, and not merely a golden body, let her forget her seventeen year old melodramatics, and turn to her poets who understand the heart underneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star-treader, George Sterling ... have, in their songs, seeds of better scenarios than California has sent us....

“California can tell us stories that are grim children of the tales of the wild Ambrose Bierce. Then there is the lovely unforgotten Nora May French, and the austere Edward Rowland Sill....”

All this from The Art of the Moving Picture may serve to answer many questions I have been asked as to my general ideas in the realms of art and verse, and[Pg xix] it may more particularly elucidate my personal attitude toward California.

One item that should perhaps chasten the native son, is that these motion picture people, so truly the hope of California, are not native sons or daughters.

When I was in Los Angeles, visiting my cousin Ruby Vachel Lindsay, we discussed many of these items at great length, as we walked about the Los Angeles region together. I owe much of my conception of the more idealistic moods of the state to those conversations. Others who have shown me what might be called the Franciscan soul, of the Franciscan minority, are Professor and Mrs. E. Olan James, my host and hostess at Mills College. Another discriminating interpreter of the coast is that follower of Alexander Campbell, Peter Clark Macfarlane, to whom I owe much of my hope for a state that will some day gleam with spiritual and Franciscan, and not earthly gold.

When I think of California, I think so emphatically of these people and the things they have to say to the native sons, and the rest, that if the discussion in this volume is not considered conclusive, I refer the reader to these, and to the California poets, and to motion picture people like Anita Loos and John Emerson, people who still dream of things that are not gilded, and know[Pg xx] the difference for instance, between St. Francis and Mammon. For a general view of those poets of California who make clear its spiritual gold, turn to “Golden Songs of the Golden State,” an anthology collected by Marguerite Wilkinson.

[Pg 1]

FIRST SECTION
THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES

[Pg 3]

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

Part I. A Short Walk Along the Coast

Yes, I have walked in California,

And the rivers there are blue and white.

Thunderclouds of grapes hang on the mountains.

Bears in the meadows pitch and fight.

(Limber, double-jointed lords of fate,

Proud native sons of the Golden Gate.)

And flowers burst like bombs in California,

Exploding on tomb and tower.

And the panther-cats chase the red rabbits,

Scatter their young blood every hour.

And the cattle on the hills of California

And the very swine in the holes

Have ears of silk and velvet

And tusks like long white poles.

And the very swine, big hearted,

Walk with pride to their doom

For they feed on the sacred raisins

Where the great black agates loom.

[Pg 4]

Goshawfuls are Burbanked with the grizzly bears.

At midnight their children come clanking up the stairs.

They wriggle up the canyons,

Nose into the caves,

And swallow the papooses and the Indian braves.

The trees climb so high the crows are dizzy

Flying to their nests at the top.

While the jazz-birds screech, and storm the brazen beach

And the sea-stars turn flip flop.

The solid Golden Gate soars up to Heaven.

Perfumed cataracts are hurled

From the zones of silver snow

To the ripening rye below,

To the land of the lemon and the nut

And the biggest ocean in the world.

While the Native Sons, like lords tremendous

Lift up their heads with chants sublime,

And the band-stands sound the trombone, the saxophone and xylophone

And the whales roar in perfect tune and time.

And the chanting of the whales of California

I have set my heart upon.

It is sometimes a play by Belasco,

Sometimes a tale of Prester John.

[Pg 5]

Part II. The Chanting of the Whales

North to the Pole, south to the Pole

The whales of California wallow and roll.

They dive and breed and snort and play

And the sun struck feed them every day

Boatloads of citrons, quinces, cherries,

Of bloody strawberries, plums and beets,

Hogsheads of pomegranates, vats of sweets,

And the he-whales’ chant like a cyclone blares,

Proclaiming the California noons

So gloriously hot some days

The snake is fried in the desert

And the flea no longer plays.

There are ten gold suns in California

When all other lands have one,

For the Golden Gate must have due light

And persimmons be well-done.

And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash

And the fume of the hollow sea.

Rally and roam in the loblolly foam

And whoop that their souls are free.

(Limber, double-jointed lords of fate,

Proud native sons of the Golden Gate.)

And they chant of the forty-niners

[Pg 6]

Who sailed round the cape for their loot

With guns and picks and washpans

And a dagger in each boot.

How the richest became the King of England,

The poorest became the King of Spain,

The bravest a colonel in the army,

And a mean one went insane.

The ten gold suns are so blasting

The sunstruck scoot for the sea

And turn to mermen and mermaids

And whoop that their souls are free.

(Limber, double-jointed lords of fate,

Proud native sons of the Golden Gate.)

And they take young whales for their bronchos

And old whales for their steeds,

Harnessed with golden seaweeds,

And driven with golden reeds.

They dance on the shore throwing roseleaves.

They kiss all night throwing hearts.

They fight like scalded wildcats

When the least bit of fighting starts.

They drink, these belly-busting devils

And their tremens shake the ground.

And then they repent like whirlwinds

[Pg 7]

And never were such saints found.

They will give you their plug tobacco.

They will give you the shirts off their backs.

They will cry for your every sorrow,

Put ham in your haversacks.

And they feed the cuttlefishes, whales and skates

With dates and figs in bales and crates:—

Shiploads of sweet potatoes, peanuts, rutabagas,

Honey in hearts of gourds:

Grapefruits and oranges barrelled with apples,

And spices like sharp sweet swords.

Part III. St. Francis of San Francisco

But the surf is white, down the long strange coast

With breasts that shake with sighs,

And the ocean of all oceans

Holds salt from weary eyes.

St. Francis comes to his city at night

And stands in the brilliant electric light

And his swans that prophesy night and day

Would soothe his heart that wastes away:

The giant swans of California

That nest on the Golden Gate

And beat through the clouds serenely

[Pg 8]

And on St. Francis wait.

But St. Francis shades his face in his cowl

And stands in the street like a lost grey owl.

He thinks of gold ... gold.

He sees on far redwoods

Dewfall and dawning:

Deep in Yosemite

Shadows and shrines:

He hears from far valleys

Prayers by young Christians,

He sees their due penance

So cruel, so cold;

He sees them made holy,

White-souled like young aspens

With whimsies and fancies untold:—

The opposite of gold.

And the mighty mountain swans of California

Whose eggs are like mosque domes of Ind,

Cry with curious notes

That their eggs are good for boats

To toss upon the foam and the wind.

He beholds on far rivers

The venturesome lovers

Sailing for the sea

All night

[Pg 9]

In swanshells white.

He sees them far on the ocean prevailing

In a year and a month and a day of sailing

Leaving the whales and their whoop unfailing

On through the lightning, ice and confusion

North of the North Pole,

South of the South Pole,

And west of the west of the west of the west,

To the shore of Heartache’s Cure,

The opposite of gold,

On and on like Columbus

With faith and eggshell sure.

Part IV. The Voice of the Earthquake

But what is the earthquake’s cry at last

Making St. Francis yet aghast:—

From here on, the audience joins in the refrain:—“gold, gold, gold.”

“Oh the flashing cornucopia of haughty California

Is gold, gold, gold.

Their brittle speech and their clutching reach

Is gold, gold, gold.

What is the fire-engine’s ding dong bell?

The burden of the burble of the bull-frog in the well?

Gold, gold, gold.

[Pg 10]

What is the color of the cup and plate

And knife and fork of the chief of state?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the flavor of the Bartlett pear?

What is the savor of the salt sea air?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the color of the sea-girl’s hair?

Gold, gold, gold.

In the church of Jesus and the streets of Venus:—

Gold, gold, gold.

What color are the cradle and the bridal bed?

What color are the coffins of the great grey dead?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the hue of the big whales’ hide?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the color of their guts’ inside?

Gold, gold, gold.

“What is the color of the pumpkins in the moonlight?

Gold, gold, gold.

The color of the moth and the worm in the starlight?

Gold, gold, gold.”

[Pg 11]

KALAMAZOO

Once, in the city of Kalamazoo,

The gods went walking, two and two,

With the friendly phœnix, the stars of Orion,

The speaking pony and singing lion.

For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart

Lived the girl with the innocent heart.

Thenceforth the city of Kalamazoo

Was the envied, intimate chum of the sun.

He rose from a cave by the principal street.

The lions sang, the dawn-horns blew,

And the ponies danced on silver feet.

He hurled his clouds of love around;

Deathless colors of his old heart

Draped the houses and dyed the ground.

Oh shrine of the wide young Yankee land,

Incense city of Kalamazoo,

That held, in the midnight, the priceless sun

As a jeweller holds an opal in hand!

[Pg 12]

From the awkward city of Oshkosh came

Love the bully no whip shall tame,

Bringing his gang of sinners bold.

And I was the least of his Oshkosh men;

But none were reticent, none were old.

And we joined the singing phœnix then,

And shook the lilies of Kalamazoo

All for one hidden butterfly.

Bulls of glory, in cars of war

We charged the boulevards, proud to die

For her ribbon sailing there on high.

Our blood set gutters all aflame,

Where the sun slept without any shame,

Cold rock till he must rise again.

She made great poets of wolf-eyed men—

The dear queen-bee of Kalamazoo,

With her crystal wings, and her honey heart.

We fought for her favors a year and a day

(Oh, the bones of the dead, the Oshkosh dead,

That were scattered along her pathway red!)

And then, in her harum-scarum way,

She left with a passing traveller-man—

With a singing Irishman

Went to Japan.

[Pg 13]

Why do the lean hyenas glare

Where the glory of Artemis had begun—

Of Atalanta, Joan of Arc,

Lorna Doone, Rosy O’Grady,

And Orphant Annie, all in one?

Who burned this city of Kalamazoo

Till nothing was left but a ribbon or two—

One scorched phœnix that mourned in the dew,

Acres of ashes, a junk-man’s cart,

A torn-up letter, a dancing shoe,

(And the bones of the valiant dead)?

Who burned this city of Kalamazoo—

Love-town, Troy-town Kalamazoo?

A harum-scarum innocent heart.

[Pg 14]

JOHN L. SULLIVAN, THE STRONG BOY OF BOSTON

Inscribed to Louis Untermeyer and Robert Frost

When I was nine years old, in 1889

I sent my love a lacy Valentine.

Suffering boys were dressed like Fauntleroys,

While Judge and Puck in giant humor vied.

The Gibson Girl came shining like a bride

To spoil the cult of Tennyson’s Elaine.

Louisa Alcott was my gentle guide....

Then ...

I heard a battle trumpet sound.

Nigh New Orleans

Upon an emerald plain

John L. Sullivan

The strong boy

Of Boston

Fought seventy-five red rounds with Jake Kilrain.

In simple sheltered 1889

Nick Carter I would piously deride.

[Pg 15]

Over the Elsie Books I moped and sighed.

St. Nicholas Magazine was all my pride,

While coarser boys on cellar doors would slide.

The grown ups bought refinement by the pound.

Rogers groups had not been told to hide.

E. P. Roe had just begun to wane.

Howells was rising, surely to attain!

The nation for a jamboree was gowned:—

Her hundredth year of roaring freedom crowned.

The British Lion ran and hid from Blaine

The razzle-dazzle hip-hurrah from Maine.

The mocking bird was singing in the lane....

Yet ...

“East side, west side, all around the town

The tots sang: ‘Ring a rosie—’

‘London Bridge is falling down.’”

And ...

John L. Sullivan

The strong boy

Of Boston

Broke every single rib of Jake Kilrain.

In dear provincial 1889,

Barnum’s bears and tigers could astound.

Ingersoll was called a most vile hound,

[Pg 16]

And named with Satan, Judas, Thomas Paine!

Robert Elsmere riled the pious brain.

Phillips Brooks for heresy was fried.

Boston Brahmins patronized Mark Twain.

The base ball rules were changed. That was a gain.

Pop Anson was our darling, pet and pride.

Native sons in Irish votes were drowned.

Tammany once more escaped its chain.

Once more each raw saloon was raising Cain.

The mocking bird was singing in the lane....

Yet ...

“East side, west side, all around the town

The tots sang: ‘Ring a rosie’

‘London Bridge is falling down.’”

And ...

John L. Sullivan

The strong boy

Of Boston

Finished the ring career of Jake Kilrain.

In mystic, ancient 1889,

Wilson with pure learning was allied.

Roosevelt gave forth a chirping sound.

Stanley found old Emin and his train.

Stout explorers sought the pole in vain.

[Pg 17]

To dream of flying proved a man insane.

The newly rich were bathing in champagne.

Van Bibber Davis, at a single bound

Displayed himself, and simpering glory found.

John J. Ingalls, like a lonely crane

Swore and swore, and stalked the Kansas plain.

The Cronin murder was the ages’ stain.

Johnstown was flooded, and the whole world cried.

We heard not of Louvain nor of Lorraine,

Or a million heroes for their freedom slain.

Of Armageddon and the world’s birth-pain—

The League of Nations, and the world one posy.

We thought the world would loaf and sprawl and mosey.

The gods of Yap and Swat were sweetly dozy.

We thought the far off gods of Chow had died.

The mocking bird was singing in the lane....

Yet ...

“East side, west side, all around the town

The tots sang: ‘Ring a rosie’

‘London Bridge is falling down.’”

And ...

John L. Sullivan knocked out Jake Kilrain.

[Pg 18]

BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN

The Campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six, as Viewed at the Time by a Sixteen Year Old, etc.

In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, lynching,

relenting, repenting millions,

There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous

things to shout about,

And knock your old blue devils out.

I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,

The one American Poet who could sing out doors.

He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,

Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender,

All the funny circus silks

Of politics unfurled,

Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,

And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.

[Pg 19]

There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle.

There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.

There were real lines drawn:

Not the silver and the gold,

But Nebraska’s cry went eastward against the dour and old,

The mean and cold.

It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen

And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,

When there came from the sunset Nebraska’s shout of joy:—

In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat

He scourged the elephant plutocrats

With barbed wire from the Platte.

The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.

They saw that summer’s noon

A tribe of wonders coming

To a marching tune.

Oh the long horns from Texas,

The jay hawks from Kansas,

The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,

The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,

[Pg 20]

The horned-toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,

From all the new-born states arow,

Bidding the eagles of the west fly on,

Bidding the eagles of the west fly on.

The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,

The rakaboor, the hellangone,

The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,

The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,

In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,

They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,

From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:—

Against the towns of Tubal Cain,

Ah,—sharp was their song.

Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,

The long-horn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.

These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:

The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,

The gossamers and whimsies,

The monkeyshines and didoes

[Pg 21]

Rank and strange

Of the canyons and the range,

The ultimate fantastics

Of the far western slope,

And of prairie schooner children

Born beneath the stars,

Beneath falling snows,

Of the babies born at midnight

In the sod huts of lost hope,

With no physician there,

Except a Kansas prayer,

With the Indian raid a howling through the air.

And all these in their helpless days

By the dour East oppressed,

Mean paternalism

Making their mistakes for them,

Crucifying half the West,

Till the whole Atlantic coast

Seemed a giant spiders’ nest.

And these children and their sons

At last rode through the cactus,

A cliff of mighty cowboys

On the lope,

[Pg 22]

With gun and rope.

And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,

And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall

Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,

The bard and the prophet of them all.

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,

Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,

Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,

And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,

Blotting out sun and moon,

A sign on high.

Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,

The scalawags made moan,

Afraid to fight.

When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,

Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,

Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,

[Pg 23]

Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting—

In silver-decked racing cart,

Buggy, buckboard, carryall,

Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,

And silver-decked farm-wagons gritted, banged and rolled,

With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tires told.

The State House loomed afar,

A speck, a hive, a football,

A captive balloon!

And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes,

and sunshine,

Every rag and flag, and Bryan picture sold,

When the rigs in many a dusty line

Jammed our streets at noon,

And joined the wild parade against the power of gold.

We roamed, we boys from High School

With mankind,

While Springfield gleamed,

Silk-lined.

Oh Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,

And the gangs that they could get!

I can hear them yelling yet.

[Pg 24]

Helping the incantation,

Defying aristocracy,

With every bridle gone,

Ridding the world of the low down mean,

Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,

We were bully, wild and wooly,

Never yet curried below the knees.

We saw flowers in the air,

Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,

—Hopes of all mankind,

Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.

Oh we bucks from every Springfield ward!

Colts of democracy—

Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.

The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.

She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.

With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,

But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.

She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.

Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.

[Pg 25]

No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way.

But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.

The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.

The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.

And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed along.

Against the ways of Tubal Cain,

Ah, sharp was their song!

The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,

The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass,

And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,

The angels in the flags, peered out to see us pass.

And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,

And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,

And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,

A place for women and men.

III

Then we stood where we could see

Every band,

[Pg 26]

And the speaker’s stand.

And Bryan took the platform.

And he was introduced.

And he lifted his hand

And cast a new spell.

Progressive silence fell

In Springfield,

In Illinois,

Around the world.

Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:

“The people have a right to make their own mistakes....

You shall not crucify mankind

Upon a cross of gold.”

And everybody heard him—

In the streets and State House yard.

And everybody heard him

In Springfield,

In Illinois,

Around and around and around the world,

That danced upon its axis

And like a darling broncho whirled.

[Pg 27]

July, August, suspense.

Wall Street lost to sense.

August, September, October,

More suspense,

And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.

Then Hanna to the rescue,

Hanna of Ohio,

Rallying the roller-tops,

Rallying the bucket-shops,

Threatening drouth and death,

Promising manna,

Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;

Invading misers’ cellars,

Tin-cans, socks,

Melting down the rocks,

Pouring out the long green to a million workers,

Spondulix by the mountain-load, to stop each new tornado,

And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,

Populistic, anarchistic,

Deacon—desperado.

[Pg 28]

Election night at midnight:

Boy Bryan’s defeat.

Defeat of western silver.

Defeat of the wheat.

Victory of letterfiles

And plutocrats in miles

With dollar signs upon their coats,

Diamond watchchains on their vests

And spats on their feet.

Victory of custodians,

Plymouth Rock,

And all that inbred landlord stock.

Victory of the neat.

Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,

The blue bells of the Rockies,

And blue bonnets of old Texas,

By the Pittsburg alleys.

Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.

Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.

Defeat of the young by the old and silly.

Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.

Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.

[Pg 29]

Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,

The man without an angle or a tangle,

Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,

The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner,

Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;

Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,

The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,

The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,

The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,

Every vote....

Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna’s McKinley,

His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?

Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,

And the flame of that summer’s prairie rose.

Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform

Read from the party in a glorious hour?

Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman,

And sledge-hammer Altgeld who wrecked his power.

[Pg 30]

Where is Hanna, bull dog Hanna,

Low browed Hanna, who said: “Stand pat”?

Gone to his place with old Pierpont Morgan.

Gone somewhere ... with lean rat Platt.

Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,

Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?

Gone to join the shadows with mighty Cromwell

And tall King Saul, till the Judgment day.

Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,

Whose name the few still say with tears?

Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,

Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.

Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,

That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?

Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,

Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.

Written at the Guanella Ranch, Empire, Colorado, August, 1919.

[Pg 31]

RAMESES II

Would that the brave Rameses, King of Time

Were throned in your souls, to raise for you

Vast immemorial dreams dark Egypt knew,

Filling these barren days with Mystery,

With Life and Death, and Immortality,

The Devouring Ages, the all-consuming Sun:

God keep us brooding on eternal things,

God make us wizard-kings.

[Pg 32]

MOSES

Yet let us raise that Egypt-nurtured prince,

Son of a Hebrew, with the dauntless scorn

And hate for bleating gods Egyptian-born,

Showing with signs to stubborn Mizraim

“God is one God, the God of Abraham,”

He who in the beginning made the Sun.

God send us Moses from his hidden grave,

God make us meek and brave.

[Pg 33]

A RHYME FOR ALL ZIONISTS

The Eyes of Queen Esther, and How they Conquered King Ahasuerus

“Esther had not showed her people nor her kindred.”

He harried lions up the peaks.

In blood and moss and snow they died.

He wore a cloak of lions’ manes

To satisfy his curious pride.

Men saw it, trimmed with emerald bands,

Flash on the crested battle-tide.

Where Bagdad stands, he hunted kings,

Burned them alive, his soul to cool.

Yet in his veins god Ormadz wrought

To make a just man of a fool.

He spoke the rigid truth, and rode,

And drew the bow, by Persian rule.

[Pg 34]

Ahasuerus in his prime

Was gracious and voluptuous.

He saw a pale face turn to him,

A gleam of Heaven’s righteousness:

A girl with hair of David’s gold

And Rachel’s face of loveliness.

He dropped his sword, he bowed his head.

She led his steps to courtesy.

He took her for his white north star:

A wedding of true majesty.

Oh, what a war for gentleness

Was in her bridal fantasy!

Why did he fall by candlelight

And press his bull-heart to her feet?

He found them as the mountain-snow

Where lions died. Her hands were sweet

As ice upon a blood-burnt mouth,

As mead to reapers in the wheat.

The little nation in her soul

Bloomed in her girl’s prophetic face.

[Pg 35]

She named it not, and yet he felt

One challenge: her eternal race.

This was the mystery of her step,

Her trembling body’s sacred grace.

He stood, a priest, a Nazarite,

A rabbi reading by a tomb.

The hardy raider saw and feared

Her white knees in the palace gloom,

Her pouting breasts and locks well combed

Within the humming, reeling room.

Her name was Meditation there:

Fair opposite of bullock’s brawn.

I sing her eyes that conquered him.

He bent before his little fawn,

Her dewy fern, her bitter weed,

Her secret forest’s floor and lawn.

He gave her Shushan[1] from the walls.

She saw it not, and turned not back.

Her eyes kept hunting through his soul

As one may seek through battle black

[Pg 36]

For one dear banner held on high,

For one bright bugle in the rack.

The scorn that loves the sexless stars:

Traditions passionless and bright:

The ten commands (to him unknown),

The pillar of the fire by night:—

Flashed from her alabaster crown

The while they kissed by candlelight.

The rarest psalms of David came

From her dropped veil (odd dreams to him).

It prophesied, he knew not how,

Against his endless armies grim.

He saw his Shushan in the dust—

Far in the ages growing dim.

Then came a glance of steely blue,

Flash of her body’s silver sword.

Her eyes of law and temple prayer

Broke him who spoiled the temple hoard.

The thief who fouled all little lands

Went mad before her, and adored.

The girl was Eve in Paradise,

Yet Judith, till her war was won.

[Pg 37]

All of the future tyrants fell

In this one king, ere night was done,

And Israel, captive then as now

Ruled with tomorrow’s rising sun.

And in the logic of the skies

He who keeps Israel in his hand,

The God whose hope for joy on earth

The Gentile yet shall understand,

Through powers like Esther’s steadfast eyes

Shall free each little tribe and land.

These verses were written for the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Philadelphia and read at their meeting, December 8, 1917.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Shushan—the royal city.

[Pg 38]

A MEDITATION ON THE SUN

Come, let us think upon the great that came

Our spiritual solar-kings, whose fame

Is quenchless in the lands of mental light,

High planets in the vast historic game:

Youths from the sky, they came in splendid flight.

We hold to them as to our day and night,

And by them measure out our moments here,

Our greatness, littleness, and wrong and right.

For like the sun, we carry yesteryears

Within our wallets: all the ancient fears

And scorns and triumphs woven in our cloaks,

Our tall plumes bought with some lost race’s tears.

Oh Sun, I wish that all the nations bright

You ever looked upon were in my sight,

That I had stood up in your royal car

With your eye-rays to search out field and height:

[Pg 39]

To see young David, leading forth his sheep,

The Christ Child on the Hill of Nazareth sleep,

To watch proud Dante climb the stranger’s stairs,

To see the ocean round Columbus leap.

And beauty absolute man’s heart has known

In those old hills where the Greek blood was sown,

They named you young Apollo in that day

And served you well, and loved your chariot-throne.

Would I had looked on Venice in her prime.

And long had watched the prayerful Gothic time

When Notre Dame arose, a mystery there

In wicked good old Paris and its grime!

Oh light, light, light! Oh Sun your light is good.

You stir the sap of garden, field and wood,

Of men and ages. And your deeds are fair,

And by this light, is God’s love understood.

So let us think upon Creation’s days

And Great Jehovah Moses came to praise:—

The God the Hebrews said excelled the sun,

To whom all psalms are due, who made the ways

[Pg 40]

The sun shall follow till he burns no more

Till he is cold and clinkered to the core.

Praise God, and not the sun too much, my soul,

The God behind the sun we must adore.

III

Oh Sun, that yet will my spring thoughts astound,

How often this lone mendicant you found

Stripped in your presence of all earthly things.

A happy dervish whirling round and round.

You were his tree of incense and his feast,

You were his wagon and his harnessed beast,

His singing brother, yet his tyrant hard,

With whip and spur and shout that never ceased.

He thought of Freedom that rides round with you

Healing the nations with a crystal dew,

The comrade of your car, with Science there,

Making the ways of men forever new.

Would we might lift a mighty battle-cry.

Nations and mendicants, and shake your sky:

[Pg 41]

Would that you caught us singing as one man

That song I sang when begging days began

Hearing it in every beam on high:

“Man’s spirit-darkness shall forever die.”

[Pg 42]

DANTE

Would we were lean and grim, and shaken with hate

Like Dante, fugitive, o’er-wrought with cares,

And climbing bitterly the stranger’s stairs,

Yet Love, Love, Love, divining: finding still

Beyond dark Hell the penitential hill,

And blessed Beatrice beyond the grave.

Jehovah lead us through the wilderness:

God make our wandering brave.

[Pg 43]

THE COMET OF PROPHECY

I had hold of the comet’s mane

A-clinging like grim death.

I passed the dearest star of all,

The one with violet breath:

The blue-gold-silver Venus star,

And almost lost my hold....

Again I ride the chaos-tide,

Again the winds are cold.

I look ahead, I look above,

I look on either hand.

I cannot sight the fields I seek,

The holy No-Man’s-Land.

And yet my heart is full of faith.

My comet splits the gloom,

His red mane slaps across my face,

His eyes like bonfires loom.

My comet smells the far off grass

Of valleys richly green.

[Pg 44]

My comet sights strange continents

My sad eyes have not seen,

We gallop through the whirling mist.

My good steed cannot fail.

And we shall reach that flowery shore,

And wisdom’s mountain scale.

And I shall find my wizard cloak

Beneath that alien sky

And touching black soil to my lips

Begin to prophesy.

While chaos sleet and chaos rain

Beat on an Indian Drum

There in tomorrow’s moon I stand

And speak the age to come.

[Pg 45]

“Confucius appeared, according to Mencius, one of his most distinguished followers, at a crisis in the nation’s history. ‘The world,’ he says, ‘had fallen into decay, and right principles had disappeared. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds were waxen rife. Ministers murdered their rulers, and sons their fathers. Confucius was frightened by what he saw,—and he undertook the work of reformation.’

“He was a native of the state of Lu, a part of the modern Shantung.... Lu had a great name among the other states of Chow ... etc.” Rev. James Legge, Professor of Chinese, University of Oxford.

[Pg 46]

SHANTUNG, OR THE EMPIRE OF CHINA IS CRUMBLING DOWN

Dedicated to William Rose Benét

Now let the generations pass—

Like sand through Heaven’s blue hour-glass.

In old Shantung,

By the capital where poetry began,

Near the only printing presses known to man,

Young Confucius walks the shore

On a sorrowful day.

The town, all books, is tumbling down

Through the blue bay.

The book-worms writhe

From rusty musty walls.

They drown themselves like rabbits in the sea.

[Pg 47]

Venomous foreigners harry mandarins

With pitchfork, blunderbuss and snickersnee.

In the book-slums there is thunder;

Gunpowder, that sad wonder,

Intoxicates the knights and beggar-men.

The old grotesques of war begin again:

Rebels, devils, fairies, are set free.

So ...

Confucius hears a carol and a hum:

A picture sea-child whirs from off his fan

In one quick breath of peach-bloom fantasy,

Then, in an instant bows the reverent knee—

A full-grown sweetheart, chanting his renown.

And then she darts into the Yellow Sea,

Calling, calling:

“Sage with holy brow,

Say farewell to China now;

Live like the swine,

Leave off your scholar-gown!

This city of books is falling, falling,

The Empire of China is crumbling down.”

[Pg 48]

Confucius, Confucius, how great was Confucius—

The sage of Shantung, and the master of Mencius?

Alexander fights the East.

Just as the Indus turns him back

He hears of tempting lands beyond,

With sword-swept cities on the rack

With crowns outshining India’s crown:

The Empire of China, crumbling down.

Later the Roman sibyls say:

“Egypt, Persia and Macedon,

Tyre and Carthage, passed away;

And the Empire of China is crumbling down.

Rome will never crumble down.”

III

See how the generations pass—

Like sand through Heaven’s blue hour-glass.

Arthur waits on the British shore

One thankful day,

For Galahad sails back at last

To Camelot Bay.

[Pg 49]

The pure knight lands and tells the tale:

“Far in the east

A sea-girl led us to a king,

The king to a feast,

In a land where poppies bloom for miles,

Where books are made like bricks and tiles.

I taught that king to love your name—

Brother and Christian he became.

“His Town of Thunder-Powder keeps

A giant hound that never sleeps,

A crocodile that sits and weeps.

“His Town of Cheese the mouse affrights

With fire-winged cats that light the nights.

They glorify the land of rust;

Their sneeze is music in the dust.

(And deep and ancient is the dust.)

“All towns have one same miracle

With the Town of Silk, the capital—

Vast book-worms in the book-built walls.

Their creeping shakes the silver halls;

They look like cables, and they seem

Like writhing roots on trees of dream.

[Pg 50]

Their sticky cobwebs cross the street,

Catching scholars by the feet,

Who own the tribes, yet rule them not,

Bitten by book-worms till they rot.

Beggars and clowns rebel in might

Bitten by book-worms till they fight.”

Arthur calls to his knights in rows:

“I will go if Merlin goes;

These rebels must be flayed and sliced—

Let us cut their throats for Christ.”

But Merlin whispers in his beard:

“China has witches to be feared.”

Arthur stares at the sea-foam’s rim

Amazed. The fan-girl beckons him!—

That slender and peculiar child

Mongolian and brown and wild.

His eyes grow wide, his senses drown.

She laughs in her wing, like the sleeve of a gown.

She lifts a key of crimson stone:

“The Great Gunpowder-town you own.”

She lifts a key with chains and rings:

“I give the town where cats have wings.”

She lifts a key as white as milk:

[Pg 51]

“This unlocks the Town of Silk”—

Throws forty keys at Arthur’s feet:

“These unlock the land complete.”

Then, frightened by suspicious knights,

And Merlin’s eyes like altar-lights,

And the Christian towers of Arthur’s town,

She spreads blue fins—she whirs away;

Fleeing far across the bay,

Wailing through the gorgeous day:

“My sick king begs

That you save his crown

And his learnèd chiefs from the worm and clown—

The Empire of China is crumbling down.”

Always the generations pass,

Like sand through Heaven’s blue hour-glass!

The time the King of Rome is born—

Napoleon’s son, that eaglet thing—

Bonaparte finds beside his throne

One evening, laughing in her wing,

The Chinese sea-child; and she cries,

Breaking his heart with emerald eyes

[Pg 52]

And fairy-bred unearthly grace:

“Master, take your destined place—

Across white foam and water blue

The streets of China call to you:

The Empire of China is crumbling down.”

Then he bends to kiss her mouth,

And gets but incense, dust and drouth.

Custodians, custodians!

Mongols and Manchurians!

Christians, wolves, Mohammedans!

In hard Berlin they cried: “O King,

China’s way is a shameful thing!”

In Tokio they cry: “O King,

China’s way is a shameful thing!”

And thus our song might call the roll

Of every land from pole to pole,

And every rumor known to time

Of China doddering—or sublime.

Slowly the generations pass—

Like sand through Heaven’s blue hour-glass.

[Pg 53]

So let us find tomorrow now:

Our towns are gone;

Our books have passed; ten thousand years

Have thundered on.

The Sphinx looks far across the world

In fury black:

She sees all western nations spent

Or on the rack.

Eastward she sees one land she knew

When from the stone

Priests of the sunrise carved her out

And left her lone.

She sees the shore Confucius walked

On his sorrowful day:

Impudent foreigners rioting,

In the ancient way;

Officials, futile as of old,

Have gowns more bright;

Bookworms are fiercer than of old,

Their skins more white;

Dust is deeper than of old,

More bats are flying;

More songs are written than of old—

More songs are dying.

[Pg 54]

Where Galahad found forty towns

Now fade and glare

Ten thousand towns with book-tiled roof

And garden-stair,

Where beggars’ babies come like showers

Of classic words:

They rule the world—immortal brooks

And magic birds.

The lion Sphinx roars at the sun:

“I hate this nursing you have done!

The meek inherit the earth too long—

When will the world belong to the strong?”

She soars; she claws his patient face—

The girl-moon screams at the disgrace.

The sun’s blood fills the western sky;

He hurries not, and will not die.

The baffled Sphinx, on granite wings,

Turns now to where young China sings.

One thousand of ten thousand towns

Go down before her silent wrath;

Yet even lion-gods may faint

And die upon their brilliant path.

She sees the Chinese children romp

[Pg 55]

In dust that she must breathe and eat.

Her tongue is reddened by its lye;

She craves its grit, its cold and heat.

The Dust of Ages holds a glint

Of fire from the foundation-stones,

Of spangles from the sun’s bright face,

Of sapphires from earth’s marrow-bones.

Mad-drunk with it, she ends her day—

Slips when a high sea-wall gives way,

Drowns in the cold Confucian sea

Where the whirring fan-girl first flew free.

In the light of the maxims of Chesterfield, Mencius,

Wilson, Roosevelt, Tolstoy, Trotsky,

Franklin or Nietzsche, how great was Confucius?

“Laughing Asia” brown and wild,

That lyric and immortal child,

His fan’s gay daughter, crowned with sand,

Between the water and the land

Now cries on high in irony,

With a voice of night-wind alchemy:

“O cat, O sphinx,

O stony-face,

The joke is on Egyptian pride,

[Pg 56]

The joke is on the human race:

‘The meek inherit the earth too long—

When will the world belong to the strong?’

I am born from off the holy fan

Of the world’s most patient gentleman.

So answer me,

O courteous sea!

O deathless sea!”

And thus will the answering Ocean call:

“China will fall,

The Empire of China will crumble down,

When the Alps and the Andes crumble down;

When the sun and the moon have crumbled down,

The Empire of China will crumble down,

Crumble down.”

[Pg 57]

In the following narrative, Lucifer is not Satan, King of Evil, who in the beginning led the rebels from Heaven, establishing the underworld.

Lucifer is here taken as a character appearing much later, the first singing creature weary of established ways in music, moved with the lust of wandering. He finds the open road between the stars too lonely. He wanders to the kingdom of Satan, there to sing a song that so moves demons and angels that he is, at its climax, momentary emperor of Hell and Heaven, and the flame kindled of the tears of the demons devastates the golden streets.

Therefore it is best for the established order of things that this wanderer shall be cursed with eternal silence and death. But since then there has been music in every temptation, in every demon voice.

Along with a set of verses called The Heroes of Time, and another The Tree of Laughing Bells, I exchanged The Last Song of Lucifer for a night’s lodging in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, as narrated in A Handy Guide for Beggars.

[Pg 58]

The fourteenth chapter of Isaiah contains these words on Lucifer:

“Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee and the worms cover thee.

“How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning. How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations.

“For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God....

“All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house.

“But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcass trodden under feet.

“Thou shalt not be joined to them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land.”

[Pg 59]

THE LAST SONG OF LUCIFER

To Be Read Like a Meditation

Lucifer dreams of his fate and then forgets the dream.

When Lucifer was undefiled,

When Lucifer was young,

When only angel-music

Fell from his glorious tongue,

Dreaming in his innocence

Beneath God’s golden trees

By genius pure his fancy fell—

By sweet divine disease—

To a wilderness of sorrows dim

Beneath the ether seas.

That father of radiant harmony,

Of music transcendently bright—

Truest to art since heaven began,

Wrapped in royal, melodious light—

That beautiful light-bearer, lofty and loyal

Dreamed bitter dreams of enigma and night.

But soon the singer woke and stood

And tuned his harp to sing anew

[Pg 60]

And scorned the dreams (as well he should)

For only to the evil crew

Are dreams of dread and evil true,

Remembered well, or understood.

The dream is fulfilled.

But when a million years were done

And a million million years beside,

He broke his harp-strings one by one;

He sighed, aweary of rich things,

He spread his pallid, heavy wings

And flew to find the deathless stains,

The wounds that come with wanderings.

He will never dream again, but the demons dream of wandering and singing, and doing all things just as he did in his day.

He chose the solemn paths of Hell,

He sang for that dumb land too well,

Defying their disdain

Till he was cursed and slain.

Ah—he shall never dream again—

Mourn, for he shall not dream again—

But the demons dream in pain,

Of wandering in the night

And singing in the night,

Singing till they reign.

Music is holy, even in the infernal world.

[Pg 61]Oh hallowed are the demons,

A-dreaming songs again,

And holy to my heart! the ancient music-art,

That echo of a memory in demon-haunted men,

That hope of music, sweet hope, vain,

That sets the world a-seeking—

A passion pure, a subtle pain

If Lucifer’s song could be completely remembered, one would be willing to pay the great price.

Too dear for song or speaking.

Oh, who would not with the demons be,

For the fullness of their memory

Of that dayspring song,

Of that holy thing

That Lucifer alone could sing,

That Hell and Earth so hopelessly

NOW FOLLOWS WHAT EVERY DEMON SAYS IN HIS HEART, REMEMBERING THAT TIME

And gloriously are seeking!

* * * * *

How the singer made his lyre.

Oh, Lucifer, great Lucifer,

Oh, fallen, ancient Lucifer,

Master, lost, of the angel choir—

Silent, suffering Lucifer:

Once your alchemies of Hell

[Pg 62]

Wrought your chains to a magic lyre

All strung with threads of purple fire,

Till the hell-hounds moaned from your bitter spell—

The sweetest song since the demons fell—

Haunting song of the heart’s desire.

How the song began.

Oh, Lucifer, great Lucifer,

You who have sung in vain,

Ecstasy of sweet regret,

Ecstasy of pain,

Strain that the angels can never forget,

Haunting the children of punishment yet,

Bowing them, bringing their tears in the darkness;

Oh, the night-caves of Chaos are breathing it yet!

The last that your bosom may ever deliver,

Oh, musical master of æons and æons....

Nor devils nor dragons may ever forget,

Though the walls of our prison should crumble and shiver,

And the death-dews of Chaos our armor should wet,

[Pg 63]

For the song of the infamous Lucifer

Was an anthem of glorious scorning

And courage, and horrible pain—

Was the song of a Son of the Morning,

A song that was sung in vain.

Oh singing was only in Heaven

Ere Lucifer’s melody came,

But when Lucifer’s harp-strings grew loud in their sighing,

When he called up the dragons by name—

The song was the sorrow of sorrows,

The song was the Hope of Despair,

Or the smile of a warrior falling—

A prayer and a curse and a prayer—

Or a soul going down through the shadows and calling,

Or the laughter of Night in his lair;

The song was the fear of ten thousand tomorrows—

On the racks of grief and of pain—

The herald of silences, dreadful, unending,

When the last little echo should listen in vain....

How the song made the demons dream they were still fighting for Satan.

[Pg 64]It was memory, memory,

Visions of glory,—

Memory, memory,

Visions of fight.

The pride of the onset,

The banners that fluttered,

The wails of the battle-pierced angels of light.

Song of the times of the Nether Empire

The age when our desperate band

Heaped our redoubts with the horrible fire

On the fringes of Holier Land—

Conquering always, conquering never,

Building a throne of sand—

When Satan still wielded that glorious scepter—

The sword of his glorious hand.

Then rang the martial music

Sung by the hosts of God

In the first of the shameful years of fear

When we bit the purple sod:

He sang that shameful battle-story—

He twanged each threaded torture-flame;

Wherever his leprous fingers came

[Pg 65]

They drew from the strings a groan of glory:

How the song enchanted them til they were in fancy the good warriors of God, and they shouted their enemy’s battle-cry.

Then we dreamed at last,

Then we lost the past,

We dreamed we were angels in battle-array:

We tore our hearts with God’s battle-yell

And the sound crashed up from the smoky fen

And the battle sweat stood forth

On the awful brows of our fighting men:

And the magical singer, grim and wild

Swept his harp again, and smiled,

And the harp-strings lifted our cries that day

Till the thundering charge reached the City on High—

God’s charge, that he thought

Had passed for aye,

When our last fond hope went down to die.

How, at the climax of the song Lucifer almost restored the first day of creation, when the Universe was happy and sinless.

Oh throbbing, sweet, enthralling spell!

Madly, madly, oh my heart—

[Pg 66]Heart of anguish, heart of Hell—

Beat the music through your night—

Pierced the strain that the wanderer

Wrought with fingers white;

For last he sang—of the morning—

The song of the Sons of the Morning—

The fire of the star-souled Lucifer

Before he had known a stain;

That song which came when the suns were young

And the Dayspring knew his place—

That joy, full born, that unknown tongue,

How the tears of the distracted demons become a heaven-climbing flame.

That shouting chant of the Sons of God

When first they saw Jehovah’s face.

And the Wanderer laughed, then sang it at last

Till it leaped as a flame to the forests on high

And the tears of the demons were fire in the sky.

How Lucifer seemed to make himself God.

And just for a breath he conquered and reigned,

For one quick pulse of time he stood;

[Pg 67]

By flame was crowned where God had been

Himself the Word sublime—

Himself the Most High Love unstained,

The Great, Good King of the Stars and Years—

Crowned, enthroned, by a leaping flame—

The fire of our love-born tears.

How the angels were conquered by the sound of his music from afar, and the Demons were torn with love.

And the angels bowed down, for his glory was vast—

Loving their conqueror, weeping, aghast—

While we sobbed, for a moment repenting the past,

And the mock-hope came, that eats and stings,

The hope for innocent dawns above,

The joy of it beat in our ears like wings,

Our iron cheeks seared with the tears of love—

Was it not enough,

Was it not enough

That our cheeks were seared with the tears of Love?

Demons and angels curse the singer.

So we cursed the harping of Lucifer

The lyre was lost from his leper hands

[Pg 68]

And the hell-hounds tore his living heart.

And the angels cursed great Lucifer

For his purple flame consumed their lands

Till golden ways were desert sands;

They hurled him down, afar, apart.

The Punishment.

Beneath where the Gulfs of Silence end,

Where never sighs nor songs descend,

Never a hell-flare in his eyes

Alone, alone, afar he lies....

Fearfully alone, beyond immortal ken

He is further down in the deep of pain

Than is Hell from the grief of men;

And his memories of music

Are rare as desert-rain.

Ended forever the ecstasy

And song too sweet for scorning—

The song that was still in vain;

And the shout of the battle-charge of God—

Ended forever the Song of the Morning—

The Song that was sung in vain.

[Pg 69]

SECOND SECTION
A RHYMED SCENARIO, SOME POEM GAMES, AND THE LIKE

[Pg 71]

A DOLL’S “ARABIAN NIGHTS”

A Rhymed Scenario for Mae Marsh, when she acts in the new many-colored films

I dreamed the play was real.

I walked into the screen.

Like Alice through the looking-glass,

I found a curious scene.

The black stones took on flame.

The shadows shone with eyes.

The colors poured and changed

In a Hell’s debauch of dyes,

In a street with incense thick,

In a court of witch-bazars,

With flambeaux by the stalls

Whose splutter hid the stars.

Camels stalked in line.

Courtezans tripped by

Dressed in silks and gems,

Copper diadems,

All the wealth they had.

[Pg 72]

This refrain to be elaborately articulated and the instrumental music then made to match it precisely.

Oh quivering lights,

Arabian Nights!

Bagdad,

Bagdad!

You were a guarded girl

In a palanquin of gold.

I was buying figs:

All my hands could hold.

You slipped a note to me.

Your eyes made me your slave.

“Twelve paces back,” you wrote.

No other word gave.

The delicate dove house swayed

Close-veiled, a snare most sweet.

“Joy” said the silver bells

On the palanquin-bearers’ feet.

Then by a mosque, a dervish

Yelled and whirled like mad.

Oh quivering lights,

Arabian Nights!

Bagdad,

Bagdad!

[Pg 73]

I reached a dim, still court.

I saw you there afar,

Beckoning from the roof,

Veiled, a cloud-wrapped star.

And your black slave said: “Proud boy,

Do you dare everything

With your young arm and bright steel?

Then climb. You are her king.”

And I heard a hiss of knives

In the doorway dark and bad.

Oh quivering lights,

Arabian Nights!

Bagdad,

Bagdad!

The stairway climbed and climbed.

It spoke. It shouted lies.

I reached a tar-black room,

A panther’s belly gloom,

Filled with howls and sighs.

I found the roof. Twelve kings

Rose up to stab me there.

But I sent them to their graves.

My singing shook the air.

[Pg 74]

My scimitar seemed more

Than any steel could be,

A whirling wheel, a pack

Of death-hounds guarding me.

And then you came like May.

You bound my torn breast well

With your discarded veil.

And flowery silence fell.

While Mohammed spread his wings

In the stars, you bent me back,

With a quick kiss touched my mouth,

And my heart was on the rack.

Oh dreadful, deathless love!

Oh kiss of Islam fire.

And your flashing hands were more

Than all a thief’s desire.

The morning after is always noted in the Arabian Nights.

I woke by twelve dead curs

On bloody, stony ground.

And the grey watch muttered “shame,”

As he tottered on his round.

You had written on my sword:—

“Goodby, O iron arm.

I love you much too well

To do you further harm.

[Pg 75]

And as my pledge and sign

You are in crimson clad.”

Oh quivering lights,

Arabian Nights!

Bagdad,

Bagdad!

* * * * *

The rocs scream in the air.

The ghouls my pathway clear.

For I have drunk the soul

Of the dazzling maid they fear.

The long handclasp you gave

Still shakes upon my hands.

O, daughter of a Jinn

I plot in Islam lands,

Haunting purple streets,

Hissing, snarling, bold,

A robber never jailed,

A beggar never cold.

I shall be sultan yet

In this old crimson clad.

[Pg 76]

Oh quivering lights,

Arabian Nights!

Bagdad,

Bagdad!

[Pg 77]

THE LAME BOY AND THE FAIRY

To be Chanted with a Suggestion of Chopin’s Berceuse

A Poem Game. See the Chinese Nightingale, pages 93 through 97

A lame boy

Met a fairy

In a meadow

Where the bells grow.

And the fairy

Kissed him gaily.

And the fairy

Gave him friendship,

Gave him healing,

Gave him wings.

“All the fashions

I will give you.

You will fly, dear,

All the long year.

[Pg 78]

“Wings of springtime,

Wings of summer,

Wings of autumn,

Wings of winter!

“Here is

A dress for springtime.”

And she gave him

A dress of grasses,

Orchard blossoms,

Wildflowers found in

Mountain passes,

Shoes of song and

Wings of rhyme.

“Here is

A dress for summer.”

And she gave him

A hat of sunflowers,

A suit of poppies,

Clover, daisies,

All from wheat-sheaves

In harvest time;

Shoes of song and

Wings of rhyme.

[Pg 79]

“Here is

A dress for autumn.”

And she gave him

A suit of red haw,

Hickory, apple,

Elder, paw paw,

Maple, hazel,

Elm and grape leaves.

And blue

And white

Cloaks of smoke,

And veils of sunlight,

From the Indian summer prime!

Shoes of song and

Wings of rhyme.

“Here is

A dress for winter.”

And she gave him

A polar bear suit,

And he heard the

Christmas horns toot,

And she gave him

Green festoons and

Red balloons and

[Pg 80]

All the sweet cakes

And the snow flakes

Of Christmas time,

Shoes of song and

Wings of rhyme.

And the fairy

Kept him laughing,

Led him dancing,

Kept him climbing

On the hill tops

Toward the moon.

“We shall see silver ships.

We shall see singing ships,

Valleys of spray today,

Mountains of foam.

We have been long away,

Far from our wonderland.

Here come the ships of love

Taking us home.

“Who are our captains bold?

They are the saints of old.

One is Saint Christopher.

[Pg 81]

He takes your hand.

He leads the cloudy fleet.

He gives us bread and meat.

His is our ship till

We reach our dear land.

“Where is our house to be?

Far in the ether sea.

There where the North Star

Is moored in the deep.

Sleepy old comets nod

There on the silver sod.

Sleepy young fairy flowers

Laugh in their sleep.

“A hundred years

And

A day,

There we will fly

And play

I spy and cross tag.

And meet on the high way,

And call to the game

Little Red Riding Hood,

[Pg 82]

Goldilocks, Santa Claus,

Every beloved

And heart-shaking name.”

And the lame child

And the fairy

Journeyed far, far

To the North Star.

[Pg 83]

THE BLACKSMITH’S SERENADE

A pantomime and farce, to be acted by My Lady on one side of a shutter, while the singer chants on the other, to an iron guitar.

John Littlehouse the redhead was a large ruddy man

Quite proud to be a blacksmith, and he loved Polly Ann, Polly Ann.

Straightway to her window with his iron guitar he came

Breathing like a blacksmith—his wonderful heart’s flame.

Though not very bashful and not very bold

He had reached the plain conclusion his passion must be told.

And so he sang: “Awake, awake,”—this hip-hoo-rayious man.

“Do you like me, do you love me, Polly Ann, Polly Ann?

The rooster on my coalshed crows at break of day.

It makes a person happy to hear his roundelay.

The fido in my woodshed barks at fall of night.

[Pg 84]

He makes one feel so safe and snug. He barks exactly right.

I swear to do my stylish best and purchase all I can

Of the flummeries, flunkeries and mummeries of man.

And I will carry in the coal and the water from the spring

And I will sweep the porches if you will cook and sing.

No doubt your Pa sleeps like a rock. Of course Ma is awake

But dares not say she hears me, for gentle custom’s sake.

Your sleeping father knows I am a decent honest man.

Will you wake him, Polly Ann,

And if he dares deny it I will thrash him, lash bash mash

Hash him, Polly Ann.

Hum hum hum, fee fie fo fum—

And my brawn should wed your beauty

Do you hear me, Polly Ann, Polly Ann?”

Polly had not heard of him before, but heard him now.

She blushed behind the shutters like a pippin on the bough.

She was not overfluttered, she was not overbold.

She was glad a lad was living with a passion to be told.

But she spoke up to her mother: “Oh, what an awful man:—”

[Pg 85]

This merry merry quite contrary tricky trixy, Polly Ann, Polly Ann.

The neighbors put their heads out of the windows. They said:—

“What sort of turtle dove is this that seems to wake the dead?”

Yes, in their nighties whispered this question to the night.

They did not dare to shout it. It wouldn’t be right.

And so, I say, they whispered:—“Does she hear this awful man,

Polly Ann, Polly Ann?”

John Littlehouse the redhead sang on of his desires:

“Steel makes the wires of lyres, makes the frames of terrible towers

And circus chariots’ tires.

Believe me, dear, a blacksmith man can feel.

I will bind you, if I can to my ribs with hoops of steel.

Do you hear me, Polly Ann, Polly Ann?”

And then his tune was silence, for he was not a fool.

He let his voice rest, his iron guitar cool.

[Pg 86]

And thus he let the wind sing, the stars sing and the grass sing,

The prankishness of love sing, the girl’s tingling feet sing,

Her trembling sweet hands sing, her mirror in the dark sing,

Her grace in the dark sing, her pillow in the dark sing,

The savage in her blood sing, her starved little heart sing,

Silently sing.

“Yes, I hear you, Mister Man,”

To herself said Polly Ann, Polly Ann.

He shouted one great loud “Good night,” and laughed,

And skipped home.

And every star was winking in the wide wicked dome.

And early in the morning, sweet Polly stole away.

And though the town went crazy, she is his wife today.

[Pg 87]

THE APPLE BLOSSOM SNOW BLUES

A “blues” is a song in the mood of Milton’s Il Penseroso, or a paragraph from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This present production is the chronicle of the secret soul of a vaudeville man, as he dances in the limelight with his haughty lady. Let the reader take special pains to make his own tune for this production, to a very delicate drum beat.

“Your

Dandelion beauty,

Your

Cherry-blossom beauty,

Your

Apple-blossom beauty,

I will dance as I can,

You rag time lady,

You jazz dancing lady,

[Pg 88]

You blues-singing lady,”

Thinks the blues-singing man.

“Your

Grace and slightness,

And your fragrant whiteness,

Make me see the bending

Of an apple-blossom bough.

You

Are a fairy,

Yet a jump-jazz dancer,

And your heart

Is a robin,

Singing, making merry

With the apple-flowers now.”

See him kneel and canter

And smirk and banter,

And essay her heart

While the gourd horns blow.

For he is her lover

And

Her dancing partner,

In the blues he made

Called “The Apple Blossom Snow.”

[Pg 89]

She does her duty

No more

Than her duty,

Yet the packed house cheers

To the gallery rim.

Her young scorn fires them,

Its pep inspires them,

They watch her lover

And envy him.

He does not fathom

What her heart has in keeping

Till that last circus leaping

Takes all by surprise.

Then he catches her softly,

Saves her gently,

And a mood for his soul

Lights her pansy eyes.

Then

She steps rare measures.

Her eyes are treasures.

Brave truth shines out

From her young-witch glance.

From the velvety shade,

[Pg 90]

Ah, the thoughts of the maid.

Relenting glory,

Unveiled by chance.

Though soon thereafter

She hides in laughter,

And flouts all his loving,

He will dance as he can,

As he can,

Like a man,

With his jazz dancing wonder,

With his pansy blossom wonder,

With his apple blossom wonder,

With his rag time lady,

Grand finale of jazz music, like the fall of a pile of dishes in the kitchen.[Pg 91]

The

Rag

Time

Man.

THE DANIEL JAZZ

Let the leader train the audience to roar like lions, and to join in the refrain “Go chain the lions down,” before he begins to lead them in this jazz.

Beginning with a strain of “Dixie.”

Darius the Mede was a king and a wonder.

His eye was proud, and his voice was thunder.

He kept bad lions in a monstrous den.

He fed up the lions on Christian men.

With a touch of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Daniel was the chief hired man of the land.

He stirred up the jazz in the palace band.

He whitewashed the cellar. He shovelled in the coal.

And Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”

Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”

Daniel was the butler, swagger and swell.

He ran up stairs. He answered the bell.

[Pg 92]

And he would let in whoever came a-calling:—

Saints so holy, scamps so appalling.

“Old man Ahab leaves his card.

Elisha and the bears are a-waiting in the yard.

Here comes Pharaoh and his snakes a-calling.

Here comes Cain and his wife a-calling.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego for tea.

Here comes Jonah and the whale,

And the Sea!

Here comes St. Peter and his fishing pole.

Here comes Judas and his silver a-calling.

Here comes old Beelzebub a-calling.”

And Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”

Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”

His sweetheart and his mother were Christian and meek.

They washed and ironed for Darius every week.

One Thursday he met them at the door:—

Paid them as usual, but acted sore.

He said:—“Your Daniel is a dead little pigeon.

He’s a good hard worker, but he talks religion.”

And he showed them Daniel in the lion’s cage.

Daniel standing quietly, the lions in a rage.

[Pg 93]

His good old mother cried:—

“Lord save him.”

And Daniel’s tender sweetheart cried:—

“Lord save him.”

And she was a golden lily in the dew.

And she was as sweet as an apple on the tree

And she was as fine as a melon in the corn-field,

Gliding and lovely as a ship on the sea,

Gliding and lovely as a ship on the sea.

And she prayed to the Lord:—

“Send Gabriel. Send Gabriel.”

King Darius said to the lions:—

“Bite Daniel. Bite Daniel.

Bite him. Bite him. Bite him!”

Here the audience roars with the leader.

Thus roared the lions:—

“We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,

We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

[Pg 94]

The audience sings this with the leader, to the old negro tune.

And Daniel did not frown,

Daniel did not cry.

He kept on looking at the sky.

And the Lord said to Gabriel:—

“Go chain the lions down,

Go chain the lions down.

Go chain the lions down.”

And Gabriel chained the lions,

And Daniel got out of the den,

And Daniel got out of the den.

And Darius said:—“You’re a Christian child,”

Darius said:—“You’re a Christian child,”

And gave him his job again,

And gave him his job again.

[Pg 95]

WHEN PETER JACKSON PREACHED IN THE OLD CHURCH

To be sung to the tune of the old Negro Spiritual “Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart I’ll pray.”

Peter Jackson was a-preaching

And the house was still as snow.

He whispered of repentance

And the lights were dim and low

And were almost out

When he gave the first shout:

“Arise, arise,

Cry out your eyes.”

And we mourned all our terrible sins away.

Clean, clean away.

Then we marched around, around,

And sang with a wonderful sound:—

“Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart I’ll pray.

Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart I’ll pray.”

[Pg 96]

And we fell by the altar

And fell by the aisle,

And found our Savior

In just a little while,

We all found Jesus at the break of the day,

We all found Jesus at the break of the day.

Blessed Jesus,

Blessed Jesus.

[Pg 97]

THE CONSCIENTIOUS DEACON

A song to be syncopated as you please

Black cats, grey cats, green cats miau—

Chasing the deacon who stole the cow.

He runs and tumbles, he tumbles and runs.

He sees big white men with dogs and guns.

He falls down flat. He turns to stare—

No cats, no dogs, and no men there.

But black shadows, grey shadows, green shadows come.

The wind says, “Miau!” and the rain says, “Hum!”

He goes straight home. He dreams all night.

He howls. He puts his wife in a fright.

Black devils, grey devils, green devils shine—

Yes, by Sambo,

And the fire looks fine!

Cat devils, dog devils, cow devils grin—

[Pg 98]

Yes, by Sambo,

And the fire rolls in.

And so, next day, to avoid the worst—

He takes that cow

Where he found her first.

[Pg 99]

DAVY JONES’ DOOR-BELL

A Chant for Boys with Manly Voices.

Every line sung one step deeper than the line preceding.

Any sky-bird sings,

“Ring, ring!”

Any church-chime calls,

“Dong ding!”

Any cannon says,

“Boom bang!”

Any whirlwind says,

“Whing whang!”

The bell-buoy hums and roars,

“Ding dong!”

And way down deep,

Where fishes throng,

By Davy Jones’ big deep-sea door,

Shaking the ocean’s flowery floor,

His door-bell booms

“Dong dong,

Dong dong,”

Deep, deep down,

[Pg 100]

“Clang boom,

Boom dong,

Boom dong!”

[Pg 101]

THE SEA SERPENT CHANTEY

There’s a snake on the western wave

And his crest is red.

He is long as a city street,

And he eats the dead.

There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea

Where the snake goes down.

And he waits in the bottom of the sea

For the men that drown.

Let the audience join in the chorus.

Chorus:—

This is the voice of the sand

(The sailors understand)

“There is far more sea than sand,

There is far more sea than land. Yo ... ho, yo ... ho.”

He waits by the door of his cave

While the ages moan.

He cracks the ribs of the ships

[Pg 102]

With his teeth of stone.

In his gizzard deep and long

Much treasure lies.

Oh, the pearls and the Spanish gold....

And the idols’ eyes....

Oh, the totem poles ... the skulls ...

The altars cold ...

The wedding rings, the dice ...

The buoy bells old.

Chorus:—This is the voice, etc.

III

Dive, mermaids, with sharp swords

And cut him through,

And bring us the idols’ eyes

And the red gold too.

Lower the grappling hooks

Good pirate men

And drag him up by the tongue

From his deep wet den.

We will sail to the end of the world,

We will nail his hide

To the main mast of the moon

In the evening tide.

Chorus:—This is the voice, etc.

[Pg 103]

Or will you let him live,

The deep-sea thing,

With the wrecks of all the world

In a black wide ring

By the hole in the bottom of the sea

Where the snake goes down,

Where he waits in the bottom of the sea

For the men that drown?

Chorus:—This is the voice, etc.

[Pg 104]

THE LITTLE TURTLE

A Recitation for Martha Wakefield, Three Years Old

There was a little turtle.

He lived in a box.

He swam in a puddle.

He climbed on the rocks.

He snapped at a musquito.

He snapped at a flea.

He snapped at a minnow.

And he snapped at me.

He caught the musquito.

He caught the flea.

He caught the minnow.

But he didn’t catch me.

[Pg 105]

THIRD SECTION
COBWEBS AND CABLES

[Pg 107]

THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION

Would that the dry hot wind called Science came,

Forerunner of a higher mystic day,

Though vile machine-made commerce clear the way—

Though nature losing shame should lose her veil,

And ghosts of buried angel-warriors wail

The fall of Heaven, and the relentless Sun

Smile on, as Abraham’s God forever dies—

Lord, give us Darwin’s eyes!

[Pg 108]

THE VISIT TO MAB

When glad vacation time began

A snail-king said to his dear spouse,

“Come, let us lock our birch-bark house

And visit some important man.

“Each summer we have hoped to go

To see the sultan Gingerbread

Who wears chopped citron on his head

And currant love-locks in a row.

“And see his vizier Chocolate Bill

And Popcorn Man, his pale young priest.

They live twelve inches to the east

Behind the lofty brown-bread hill.”

His wife said: “Simple elegance

Is what we want. It is the mode

To take the little western road

To where the blue-grass fairies dance.

[Pg 109]

“I think the queen will recognize

Our atmosphere of wealth and ease.

My steel-grey shell is sure to please,

And she will fear your fiery eyes.”

And so they visited proud Mab.

The firs were laughing overhead,

The chattering roses burned deep-red.

The snails were queer and dumb and drab.

The contrast made them quite the thing.

A setting spells success at times.

Mab gave the queen a book of rhymes.

A tissue-cap she gave the king,

Like caps the children wear for sport.

And vainer than he well could say

He called gay Mab his “pride and stay,”

With pompous speeches to the court.

They journeyed home, made young indeed,

But opening the book of song

Each poem looked so deep and long

They could not bear to start to read.

[Pg 110]

THE SONG OF THE STURDY SNAILS

Gristly bare-bone fingers

On my window-pane—

The drumbeat of a ghost

Louder than the rain!

Oh frail, storm-shaken hut—

No candle, not a spark

Of fire within the grate.

Oh the lonely dark!

Trembling by the window

I watched the lightning flash

And saw the little villains

Upon the outer sash

And other small musicians

Upon the window-pane—

Garden snails, a-dragging

Their shells amid the rain!

[Pg 111]

The thunder blew away.

My happiness began.

Over the dripping darkness

Rills of moonlight ran.

In the silence rich

The scratching of the shells

Became a crooning music

A lazy peal of bells.

So fearless in the night

My sluggard brothers bold!

Your fancies swift and glowing;

Your footsteps slow and cold!

My happy beggar-brothers

Tuning all together,

Playing on the pane

Praise of stormy weather!

Upon a ragged pillow

At last I laid my head

And watched the sparkling window

And the wan light on my bed.

[Pg 112]

Through the glass came flying

Dream snails, with leafy wings—

Glided on the moonbeams—

And all the snails were kings!

With crowns of pollen yellow

And eyes of firefly gold

Behold—to crooning music

Their coiling wings unrolled!

These tiny kings I saw

Reigning over white

Bisque jars of fairy flowers

In sturdy proud delight.

These jars in fairyland

Await good snails that keep

Vigils on the windows

Of beggars fast asleep.

[Pg 113]

ANOTHER WORD ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION

“There’s machinery in the butterfly.

There’s a mainspring to the bee.

There’s hydraulics to a daisy

And contraptions to a tree.

“If we could see the birdie

That makes the chirping sound

With psycho-analytic eyes,

And x ray, scientific eyes,

We could see the wheels go round.”

And I hope all men

Who think like this

Will soon lie

Underground.

[Pg 114]

DANCING FOR A PRIZE

Three fairies by the Sangamon

Were dancing for a prize.

The rascals were alike indeed

As they danced with drooping eyes.

I gave the magic acorn

To the one I loved the best,

The imp that made me think of her

My heart’s eternal guest,

My lady of the tea-rose, my lady far away,

Queen of the fleets of No-Man’s-Land

That sail to old Cathay.

How did the trifler hint of her?

Ah, when the dance was done

They begged me for the acorn,

Laughing every one.

Two had eyes of midnight,

And one had golden eyes,

And I gave the golden acorn

To the scamp with golden eyes.

Confessor Dandelion,

[Pg 115]

My priest so grey and wise

Whispered when I gave it

To the girl with golden eyes:

“She is like your Queen of Glory

On China’s holy strand

Who drove the coiling dragons

Like doves before her hand.”

[Pg 116]

COLD SUNBEAMS

The Question:

“Tell me, where do fairy queens

Find their bridal veils?”

The Answer:

“If you were now a fairy queen

Then I, your faithless page and bold

Would win the realm by winning you.

Your veil would be transparent gold

White magic spiders wove for you

At cold grey dawn, from sunbeams cold

While robins sang amid the dew.”

[Pg 117]

FOR ALL WHO EVER SENT LACE VALENTINES

The little-boy lover

And little-girl lover

Met the first time

At the house of a friend.

And great the respect

Of the little-boy lover.

The awe and the fear of her

Stayed to the end.

The little girl chattered

Incessantly chattered,

Hardly would look

When he tried to be nice.

But deeply she trembled

The little-girl lover,

Eaten with flame

While she tried to be ice.

The lion of loving

The terrible lion

[Pg 118]

Woke in the two

Long before they could wed.

The world said: “Child hearts

You must keep till the summer.

It is not allowed

That your hearts should be red.”

If only a wizard

A kindly grey wizard

Had built them a house

In a cave underground.

With an emerald door,

And honey to eat!

But it seemed that no wizard

Was waiting around.

Oh children with fancies,

The rarest of notions,

The rarest of passions

And hopes here below!

Many a child,

His young heart too timid

Has fled from his princess

No other to know.

[Pg 119]

I have seen them with faces

Like books out of Heaven,

With messages there

The harsh world should read,

The lions and roses and lilies of love,

Its tender, mystic, tyrannical need.

Were I god of the village

My servants should mate them.

Were I priest of the church

I would set them apart.

If the wide state were mine

It should live for such darlings,

And hedge with all shelter

The child-wedded heart.

[Pg 120]

MY LADY IS COMPARED TO A YOUNG TREE

When I see a young tree

In its white beginning,

With white leaves

And white buds

Barely tipped with green,

In the April weather,

In the weeping sunshine—

Then I see my lady,

My democratic queen,

Standing free and equal

With the youngest woodland sapling

Swaying, singing in the wind,

Delicate and white:

Soul so near to blossom,

Fragile, strong as death;

A kiss from far off Eden,

A flash of Judgment’s trumpet—

April’s breath.

[Pg 121]

TO EVE, MAN’S DREAM OF WIFEHOOD AS DESCRIBED BY MILTON

Darling of Milton—when that marble man

Saw you in shadow, coming from God’s hand

Serene and young, did he not chant for you

Praises more quaint than he could understand?

“To justify the ways of God to man”—

So, self-deceived, his printed purpose runs.

His love for you is the true key to him,

And Uriel and Michael were your sons.

Your bosom nurtured his Urania.

Your meek voice, piercing through his midnight sleep

Shook him far more than silver chariot wheels

Or rattling shields, or trumpets of the deep.

Titan and lover, could he be content

With Eden’s narrow setting for your spell?

You wound soft arms around his brows. He smiled

And grimly for your home built Heaven and Hell.

[Pg 122]

That was his posy. A strange gift, indeed.

We bring you what we can, not what is fit.

Eve, dream of wifehood! Each man in his way

Serves you with chants according to his wit.

[Pg 123]

A KIND OF SCORN

You do not know my pride

Or the storm of scorn I ride.

I am too proud to kiss you and leave you

Without wonders

Spreading round you like flame.

I am too proud to leave you

Without love

Haunting your very name:

Until you bear the Grail

Above your head in splendor

O child, dear and pale.

I am too proud to leave you

Though we part forevermore

Till all your thoughts

Go up toward Glory’s door.

Oh, I am but a sinner proud and poor,

Utterly without merit

To help you climb in wonder

[Pg 124]

A stair toward Heaven’s door—

Except that I have prayed my God,

And He will give the Grail,

And you will mourn no longer,

Beset, confused, and pale.

And God will lift you far on high,

The while I pray and pray

Until the hour I die.

The effectual fervent prayer availeth much.

And my first prayer ascends this proud harsh day.

[Pg 125]

HARPS IN HEAVEN

I will bring you great harps in Heaven,

Made of giant shells

From the jasper sea.

With a thousand burnt up years behind,

What then of the gulf from you to me?

It will be but the width of a thread,

Or the narrowest leaf of our sheltering tree.

You dare not refuse my harps in Heaven.

Or angels will mock you, and turn away.

Or with angel wit,

Will praise your eyes,

And your pure Greek lips, and bid you play,

And sing of the love from them to you,

And then of my poor flaming heart

In the far off earth, when the years were new.

I will bring you such harps in Heaven

That they will shake at your touch and breath,

Whose threads are rainbows,

Seventy times seven,

Whose voice is life, and silence death.

[Pg 126]

THE CELESTIAL CIRCUS

In Heaven, if not on earth,

You and I will be dancing.

I will whirl you over my head,

A torch and a flag and a bird,

A hawk that loves my shoulder,

A dove with plumes outspread.

We will whirl for God when the trumpets

Speak the millennial word.

We will howl in praise of God,

Dervish and young cyclone.

We will ride in the joy of God

On circus horses white.

Your feet will be white lightning,

Your spangles white and regal,

We will leap from the horses’ backs

To the cliffs of day and night.

We will have our rest in the pits of sleep

When the darkness heaps upon us,

[Pg 127]

And buries us for æons

Till we rise like grass in the spring.

We will come like dandelions,

Like buttercups and crocuses,

And all the winter of our sleep

But make us storm and sing.

We will tumble like swift foam

On the wave-crests of old ghostland,

And dance on the crafts of doom,

And wrestle on the moon.

And Saturn and his triple ring

Will be our tinsel circus,

Till all sad wraiths of yesterday

With the stars rejoice and croon.

O dancer, love undying,

My soul, my swan, my eagle,

The first of our million dancing years

Dawns, dawns soon.

[Pg 128]

THE FIRE-LADDIE, LOVE

[Pg 131]

The door has a bolt.

The window a grate.

O friend we are trapped

In the factory, Fate.

The flames pierce the ceiling.

The brands heap the floor.

But listen, dear heart:

A song at the door!

The forcing of bolts,

The hewing of oak!

A sword breaks the lock

With one cleaving stroke.

Naked and fair

Unscathed and wild

Behold he comes swiftly,

An elfin-eyed child.

The fire-laddie, Love,

Is our hero this night,

As he walks on the embers

His plumes are cloud white.

[Pg 129]

He sings of the lightning

And snow of desire,

His step parts the veil

Of the factory fire.

Oh his chubby child hands,

Oh his long curls agleam,

From out their soft tossing

Comes thunder and dream.

Our fire-laddie, Love,

At the last moment here,

To bear us away

To a road without fear,

To the dark, to the wind,

To the mist, to the dawn,

Where the lilac blooms nod

By the rain renewed lawn.

To a land of deep knowledge

Our tired feet are led,

While the stars of new morning

Still glint overhead.

Sweet Love walks between us

With silences long.

His step is the music.

The day is the song.

[Pg 130]

FOURTH SECTION
RHYMES CONCERNING THE LATE WORLD WAR AND THE NEXT WAR

[Pg 133]

IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND JOYCE KILMER, POET AND SOLDIER

Written Armistice Day, November eleventh, 1918

I hear a thousand chimes,

I hear ten thousand chimes,

I hear a million chimes

In Heaven.

I see a thousand bells,

I see ten thousand bells,

I see a million bells

In Heaven.

Listen, friends and companions.

Through the deep heart,

Sweetly they toll.

I hear the chimes

Of tomorrow ring,

The azure bells

Of eternal love....

I see the chimes

[Pg 134]

Of tomorrow swing:

On unseen ropes

They gleam above.

Rejoice, friends and companions.

Through the deep heart

Sweetly they toll.

They shake the sky

They blaze and sing.

They fill the air

Like larks a-wing,

Like storm-clouds

Turned to blue-bell flowers.

Like Spring gone mad,

Like stars in showers.

Join the song,

Friends and companions.

Through the deep heart

Sweetly they toll.

And some are near,

And touch my hand,

Small whispering blooms

[Pg 135]

From Beulah Land.

Giants afar

Still touch the sky,

Still give their giant

Battle-cry.

Join hands, friends and companions.

Through the deep heart

Sweetly they toll.

And every bell

Is voice and breath

Of a spirit

Who has conquered death,

In this great war

Has given all,

Like Kilmer

Heard the hero-call.

Join hands,

Poets,

Friends,

Companions.

Through the deep heart

Sweetly they toll!

[Pg 136]

THE TIGER ON PARADE

The Sparrow and the Robin on a toot

Drunk on honey-dew and violet’s breath

Came knocking at the brazen bars of Death.

And Death, no other than a tiger caged,

In a street parade that had no ending,

Roared at them and clawed at them and raged—

Whose chirping was the height of their offending.

His paws too big—their fluttering bodies small

Escaped unscathed above the City Hall.

They learned new dances, scattering birdy laughter,

And filled again their throats with honey-dew.

A Maltese kitten killed them, two days after.

But they had had their fill. It was enough:—

Had quarreled, made up, on many a lilac swayed,

Darted through sunny thunder-clouds and rainbows,

High above that tiger on parade.

[Pg 137]

THE FEVER CALLED WAR

Love and Kindness,

Two sad shadows

Over the old nations,

Bigger than the world,

Mists above a grave!

Says Love, the shadow

To Kindness the shadow:—

“I weep for the children

No miracle will save.

All the little children

Are down with the fever,

Thousands upon thousands,

Blind and deaf and mad.

Their fathers are all dead,

And the same raging fever

Is burning up the children,

The babes that once were glad.”

[Pg 138]

STANZAS IN JUST THE RIGHT TONE FOR THE SPIRITED GENTLEMEN WHO WOULD CONQUER MEXICO

Alexander

Would I might waken in you Alexander,

Murdering the nations wickedly,

Flooding his time with blood remorselessly,

Sowing new Empires, where the Athenian light,

Knowledge and music, slay the Asian night,

And men behold Apollo in the sun.

God make us splendid, though by grievous wrong.

God make us fierce and strong.

Mohammed

Would that on horses swifter than desire

We rode behind Mohammed ’round the zones

With swords unceasing, sowing fields of bones,

Till New America, ancient Mizraim,

Cry: “Allah is the God of Abraham.”

God make our host relentless as the sun,

Each soul your spear, your banner and your slave,

God help us to be brave.

[Pg 139]

Napoleon

Would that the cold adventurous Corsican

Woke with new hope of glory, strong from sleep,

Instructed how to conquer and to keep

More justly, having dreamed awhile, yea crowned

With shining flowers, God-given; while the sound

Of singing continents, following the sun,

Calls freeborn men to guard Napoleon’s throne

Who makes the eternal hopes of man his own.

[Pg 140]

THE MODEST JAZZ-BIRD

The Jazz-bird sings a barnyard song—

A cock-a-doodle bray,

A jingle-bells, a boiler works,

A he-man’s roundelay.

The eagle said, “My noisy son,

I send you out to fight!”

So the youngster spread his sunflower wings

And roared with all his might.

His headlight eyes went flashing

From Oregon to Maine;

And the land was dark with airships

In the darting Jazz-bird’s train.

Crossing the howling ocean,

His bell-mouth shook the sky;

And the Yankees in the trenches

Gave back the hue and cry.

[Pg 141]

And Europe had not heard the like—

And Germany went down!

The fowl of steel with clashing claws

Tore off the Kaiser’s crown.

[Pg 142]

When the statue of Andrew Jackson before the White House in Washington is removed, America is doomed. The nobler days of America’s innocence, in which it was set up, always have a special tang for those who are tasty. But this is not all. It is only the America that has the courage of her complete past that can hold up her head in the world of the artists, priests and sages. It is for us to put the iron dog and deer back upon the lawn, the John Rogers group back into the parlor, and get new inspiration from these and from Andrew Jackson ramping in bronze replica in New Orleans, Nashville and Washington, and add to them a sense of humor, till it becomes a sense of beauty that will resist the merely dulcet and affettuoso.

Please read Lorado Taft’s History of American Sculpture, pages 123-127, with these matters in mind. I quote a few bits:

“... The maker of the first equestrian statue in the history of American sculpture: Clark Mills.... Never having seen General Jackson or an equestrian statue, he felt himself incompetent ... the incident, however, made an impression on his mind, and he reflected sufficiently to produce a design which was the very one subsequently[Pg 143] executed.... Congress appropriated the old cannon captured by General Jackson.... Having no notion, nor even suspicion of a dignified sculptural treatment of a theme, the clever carpenter felt, nevertheless, the need of a feature.... He built a colossal horse, adroitly balanced on the hind legs, and America gazed with bated breath. Nobody knows or cares whether the rider looks like Jackson or not.

“The extraordinary pose of the horse absorbs all attention, all admiration. There may be some subconscious feeling of respect for a rider who holds on so well....”

[Pg 144]

THE STATUE OF OLD ANDREW JACKSON

Written while America was in the midst of the war with Germany, August, 1918

Andrew Jackson was eight feet tall.

His arm was a hickory limb and a maul.

His sword was so long he dragged it on the ground.

Every friend was an equal. Every foe was a hound.

Andrew Jackson was a Democrat,

Defying kings in his old cocked hat.

His vast steed rocked like a hobby horse.

But he sat straight up. He held his course.

He licked the British at Noo Orleens;

Beat them out of their elegant jeans.

He piled the cotton-bales twenty feet high,

And he snorted “freedom,” and it flashed from his eye.

And the American Eagle swooped through the air,

And cheered when he heard the Jackson swear:—

[Pg 145]

“By the Eternal, let them come.

Sound Yankee Doodle. Let the bullets hum.”

And his wild men, straight from the woods, fought on

Till the British fops were dead and gone.

And now Old Andrew Jackson fights

To set the sad big world to rights.

He joins the British and the French.

He cheers up the Italian trench.

He’s making Democrats of these,

And freedom’s sons of Japanese.

His hobby horse will gallop on

Till all the infernal Huns are gone.

Yes,

Yes!

By the Eternal!

Old Andrew Jackson!

[Pg 146]

SEW THE FLAGS TOGETHER

Great wave of youth, ere you be spent,

Sweep over every monument

Of caste, smash every high imperial wall

That stands against the new World State,

And overwhelm each ravening hate,

And heal, and make blood-brothers of us all.

Nor let your clamor cease

Till ballots conquer guns.

Drum on for the world’s peace

Till the Tory power is gone.

Envenomed lame old age

Is not our heritage,

But springtime’s vast release, and flaming dawn.

Peasants, rise in splendor

And your accounting render

Ere the lords unnerve your hand!

Sew the flags together.

Do not tear them down.

Hurl the worlds together.

[Pg 147]

Dethrone the wallowing monster

And the clown.

Resolving:—

“Only that shall grow

In Balkan furrow, Chinese row,

That blooms, and is perpetually young.”

That only be held fine and dear

That brings heart-wisdom year by year

And puts this thrilling word upon the tongue:

“The United States of Europe, Asia, and the World.”

“Youth will be served,” now let us cry.

Hurl the referendum.

Your fathers, five long years ago,

Resolved to strike, too late.

Now

Sun-crowned crowds

Innumerable,

Of boys and girls

Imperial,

With your patchwork flag of brotherhood

On high,

With every silk

In one flower-banner whirled—

Rise,

[Pg 148]

Citizens of one tremendous state,

The United States of Europe, Asia, and the World.

The dawn is rose-drest and impearled.

The guards of privilege are spent.

The blood-fed captains nod.

So Saxon, Slav, French, German,

Rise,

Yankee, Chinese, Japanese,

All the lands, all the seas,

With the blazing rainbow flag unfurled,

Rise, rise,

Take the sick dragons by surprise,

Highly establish,

In the name of God,

The United States of Europe, Asia, and the World.

Written for William Stanley Braithwaite’s Victory Anthology issued at once, after Armistice Day, November, 1918.

[Pg 149]

JUSTINIAN

(The Tory Reply)

Nay, let us have the marble peace of Rome,

Recorded in the Code Justinian,

Till Pagan Justice shelters man from man.

Fanatics snarl like mongrel dogs; the code

Will build each custom like a Roman Road,

Direct as daylight, clear-eyed as the sun.

God grant all crazy world-disturbers cease.

God give us honest peace.

[Pg 150]

THE VOICE OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

I saw St. Francis by a stream

Washing his wounds that bled.

The aspens quivered overhead.

The silver doves flew round.

Weeping and sore dismayed

“Peace, peace,” St. Francis prayed.

But the soft doves quickly fled.

Carrion crows flew round.

An earthquake rocked the ground.

“War, war,” the west wind said.

[Pg 151]

IN WHICH ROOSEVELT IS COMPARED TO SAUL

Written and published in 1913, and republished five years later, in The Boston Transcript, on the death of Roosevelt.

Where is David?... Oh God’s people

Saul has passed, the good and great.

Mourn for Saul, the first anointed,

Head and shoulders o’er the state.

He was found among the prophets:

Judge and monarch, merged in one.

But the wars of Saul are ended,

And the works of Saul are done.

Where is David, ruddy shepherd,

God’s boy-king for Israel?

Mystic, ardent, dowered with beauty,

Singing where still waters dwell?

[Pg 152]

Prophet, find that destined minstrel

Wandering on the range today,

Driving sheep, and crooning softly

Psalms that cannot pass away.

“David waits,” the prophet answers,

“In a black, notorious den,

In a cave upon the border,

With four hundred outlaw men.

“He is fair and loved of women,

Mighty hearted, born to sing:

Thieving, weeping, erring, praying,

Radiant, royal rebel-king.

“He will come with harp and psaltry,

Quell his troop of convict swine,

Quell his mad-dog roaring rascals,

Witching them with tunes divine.

“They will ram the walls of Zion,

They will win us Salem hill,

All for David, shepherd David,

Singing like a mountain rill.”

[Pg 153]

HAIL TO THE SONS OF ROOSEVELT

“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”—Samson’s riddle.

There is no name for brother

Like the name of Jonathan

The son of Saul.

And so we greet you all:

The sons of Roosevelt—

The sons of Saul.

Four brother Jonathans went out to battle.

Let every Yankee poet sing their praise

Through all the days—

What David sang of Saul

And Jonathan, beloved more than all.

God grant such sons, begot of our young men,

To make each generation glad again.

Let sons of Saul be springing up again:

Out of the eater, fire and power again.

From the lost lion, honey for all men.

[Pg 154]

I hear the sacred Rocky Mountains call,

I hear the Mississippi Jordan call:

“Stand up, America, and praise them all,

Living and dead, the fine young sons of Saul!”

[Pg 155]

THE SPACIOUS DAYS OF ROOSEVELT

These were the spacious days of Roosevelt.

Would that among you chiefs like him arose

To win the wrath of our united foes,

To chain King Mammon in the donjon-keep,

To rouse our godly citizens that sleep

Till as one soul, we shout up to the sun

The battle-yell of freedom and the right—

“Lord, let good men unite.”

Nay, I would have you lonely and despised.

Statesmen whom only statesmen understand,

Artists whom only artists can command,

Sages whom all but sages scorn, whose fame

Dies down in lies, in synonyms for shame

With the best populace beneath the sun.

God give us tasks that martyrs can revere,

Still too much hated to be whispered here.

Would we might drink, with knowledge high and kind

The hemlock cup of Socrates the king,

Knowing right well we know not anything,

[Pg 156]

With full life done, bowing before the law,

Binding young thinkers’ hearts with loyal awe,

And fealty fixed as the ever-enduring sun—

God let us live, seeking the highest light,

God help us die aright.

Nay, I would have you grand, and still forgotten,

Hid like the stars at noon, as he who set

The Egyptian magic of man’s alphabet;

Or that far Coptic, first to dream in pain

That dauntless souls cannot by death be slain—

Conquering for all men then, the fearful grave.

God keep us hid, yet vaster far than death.

God help us to be brave.

[Pg 157]

FIFTH SECTION
RHYMES OF THE MIDDLE WEST AND SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS

[Pg 159]

WHEN THE MISSISSIPPI FLOWED IN INDIANA

Inscribed to Bruce Campbell, who read Tom Sawyer with me in the old house

Beneath Time’s roaring cannon

Many walls fall down.

But though the guns break every stone,

Level every town:—

Within our Grandma’s old front hall

Some wonders flourish yet:—

The Pavement of Verona,

Where stands young Juliet,

The roof of Blue-beard’s palace,

And Kublai Khan’s wild ground,

The cave of young Aladdin,

Where the jewel-flowers were found,

And the garden of old Sparta

Where little Helen played,

The grotto of Miranda

That Prospero arrayed,

[Pg 160]

And the cave, by the Mississippi,

Where Becky Thatcher strayed.

On that Indiana stairway

Gleams Cinderella’s shoe.

Upon that mighty mountainside

Walks Snow-white in the dew.

Upon that grassy hillside

Trips shining Nicolette:—

That stairway of remembrance

Time’s cannon will not get—

That chattering slope of glory

Our little cousins made,

That hill by the Mississippi

Where Becky Thatcher strayed.

Spring beauties on that cliffside,

Love in the air,

While the soul’s deep Mississippi

Sweeps on, forever fair.

And he who enters in the cave,

Nothing shall make afraid,

The cave by the Mississippi

Where Tom and Becky strayed.

[Pg 161]

THE FAIRY FROM THE APPLE-SEED

Oh apple-seed I planted in a silly shallow place

In a bowl of wrought silver, with Sangamon earth within it,

Oh baby tree that came, without an apple on it,

A tree that grew a tiny height, but thickened on apace,

With bossy glossy arms, and leaves of trembling lace.

One night the trunk was rent, and the heavy bowl rocked round,

The boughs were bending here and there, with a curious locust sound,

And a tiny dryad came, from out the doll tree,

And held the boughs in ivory hands,

And waved her black hair round,

And climbed, and ate with merry words

The sudden fruit it bore.

And in the leaves she hides and sings

And guards my study door.

She guards it like a watchdog true

And robbers run away.

[Pg 162]

Her eyes are lifted spears all night,

But dove-eyes in the day.

And she is stranger, stronger

Than the funny human race.

Lovelier her form, and holier her face.

She feeds me flowers and fruit

With a quaint grace.

She dresses in the apple-leaves

As delicate as lace.

This girl that came from Sangamon earth

In a bowl of silver bright

From an apple-seed I planted in a silly shallow place.

[Pg 163]

A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN

Guns salute, and crows and pigeons fly,

Bronzed, Homeric bards go striding by,

Shouting “Glory” amid the cannonade:—

It is the cross-roads

Resurrection

Parade.

Actors, craftsmen, builders, join the throng,

Painters, sculptors, florists tramp along,

Farm-boys prance, in tinsel, tin and jade:—

It is the cross-roads

Love and Laughter

Crusade.

The sun is blazing big as all the sky,

The mustard-plant with the sunflower climbing high,

With the Indian corn in fiery plumes arrayed:—

It is the cross-roads

Love and Beauty

Crusade.

[Pg 164]

Free and proud and mellow jamboree,

Roar and foam upon the prairie sea,

Tom turkeys sing the sun a serenade:—

It is the cross-roads

Resurrection

Parade.

Our sweethearts dance, with wands as white as milk,

With veils of gold and robes of silver silk,

Their caps in velvet pansy-patterns made:—

It is the cross-roads

Resurrection

Parade.

Wandering ’round the shrines we understand,

Waving oak-boughs cheap and close at hand,

And field-flowers fair, for which no man has paid:—

It is the cross-roads

Love and Beauty

Crusade.

Hieroglyphic marchers here we bring.

Rich inscriptions strut and talk and sing.

A scroll to read, a picture-word brigade:—

It is the cross-roads

[Pg 165]

Love and Laughter

Crusade.

Swans for symbols deck the banners rare,

Mighty acorn-signs command the air,

For hearts of oak, by flying beauty swayed:—

It is the cross-roads

Resurrection

Parade.

The flags are big, like rainbows flashing ’round,

They spread like sails, and lift us from the ground,

Star-born ships, that have come in masquerade:—

It is the cross-roads

Resurrection

Parade.

[Pg 166]

THE DREAM OF ALL THE SPRINGFIELD WRITERS

I’ll haunt this town, though gone the maids and men,

The darling few, my friends and loves today.

My ghost returns, bearing a great sword-pen

When far off children of their children play.

That pen will drip with moonlight and with fire.

I’ll write upon the church-doors and the walls.

And reading there, young hearts shall leap the higher

Though drunk already with their own love-calls.

Still led of love and arm in arm, strange gold

Shall find in tracing the far-speeding track

The dauntless war-cries that my sword-pen bold

Shall carve on terraces and tree-trunks black—

On tree-trunks black beneath the blossoms white:—

Just as the phosphorent merman, bound for home

Jewels his fire-path in the tides at night

While hurrying sea-babes follow through the foam.

[Pg 167]

And in December when the leaves are dead

And the first snow has carpeted the street

While young cheeks flush a healthful Christmas red

And young eyes glisten with youth’s fervor sweet—

My pen shall cut in winter’s snowy floor

Cries that in channelled glory leap and shine,

My Village Gospel, living evermore

Amid rejoicing, loyal friends of mine.

[Pg 168]

THE SPRINGFIELD OF THE FAR FUTURE

Some day our town will grow old.

“She is wicked and raw,” men say,

“Awkward and brash and profane.”

But the years have a healing way.

The years of God are like bread,

Balm of Gilead and sweet.

And the soul of this little town

Our Father will make complete.

Some day our town will grow old,

Filled with the fullness of time,

Treasure on treasure heaped

Of beauty’s tradition sublime.

Proud and gay and grey

Like Hannah with Samuel blest.

Humble and girlish and white

Like Mary, the manger guest.

Like Mary the manger queen

Bringing the God of Light

[Pg 169]

Till Christmas is here indeed

And earth has no more of night,

And hosts of Magi come,

The wisest under the sun

Bringing frankincense and praise

For her gift of the Infinite One.

[Pg 170]

AFTER READING THE SAD STORY OF THE FALL OF BABYLON

Oh Lady, my city, and new flower of the prairie,

What have we to do with this long time ago?

Oh lady love,

Bud of tomorrow,

With eyes that hold the hundred years

Yet to ebb and flow,

And breasts that burn

With great great grandsons

All their valor, all their tears,

A century hence shall know,

What have we to do

With this long time ago?

[Pg 171]

ALEXANDER CAMPBELL

“The present material universe, yet unrevealed in all its area, in all its tenantries, in all its riches, beauty and grandeur will be wholly regenerated. Of this fact we have full assurance since He that now sits upon the throne of the Universe has pledged His word for it, saying: ‘Behold I will create all things new,’ consequently, ‘new heavens, new earth,’ consequently, new tenantries, new employments, new pleasures, new joys, new ecstasies. There is a fullness of joy, a fullness of glory and a fullness of blessedness of which no living man, however enlightened, however enlarged, however gifted, ever formed or entertained one adequate conception.”

The above is the closing paragraph in Alexander Campbell’s last essay in the Millennial Harbinger, which he had edited thirty-five years. This paragraph appeared November, 1865, four months before his death.

[Pg 172]

I—MY FATHERS CAME FROM KENTUCKY

I was born in Illinois,—

Have lived there many days.

And I have Northern words,

And thoughts,

And ways.

But my great grandfathers came

To the west with Daniel Boone,

And taught his babes to read,

And heard the red-bird’s tune;

And heard the turkey’s call,

And stilled the panther’s cry,

And rolled on the blue-grass hills,

And looked God in the eye.

And feud and Hell were theirs;

Love, like the moon’s desire,

[Pg 173]

Love like a burning mine,

Love like rifle-fire.

I tell tales out of school

Till these Yankees hate my style.

Why should the young cad cry,

Shout with joy for a mile?

Why do I faint with love

Till the prairies dip and reel?

My heart is a kicking horse

Shod with Kentucky steel.

No drop of my blood from north

Of Mason and Dixon’s line.

And this racer in my breast

Tears my ribs for a sign.

But I ran in Kentucky hills

Last week. They were hearth and home....

And the church at Grassy Springs,

Under the red-bird’s wings

Was peace and honeycomb.

[Pg 174]

II—WRITTEN IN A YEAR WHEN MANY OF MY PEOPLE DIED

I have begun to count my dead.

They wave green branches

Around my head,

Put their hands upon my shoulders,

Stand behind me,

Fly above me—

Presences that love me.

They watch me daily,

Murmuring, gravely, gaily,

Praising, reproving, readily.

And every year that company

Grows the greater, steadily.

And every day I count my dead

In robes of sunrise, blue and red.

[Pg 175]

III—A RHYMED ADDRESS TO ALL RENEGADE CAMPBELLITES, EXHORTING THEM TO RETURN

O prodigal son, O recreant daughter,

When broken by the death of a child

You called for the greybeard Campbellite elder,

Who spoke as of old in the wild.

His voice held echoes of the deep woods of Kentucky.

He towered in apostolic state,

While the portrait of Campbell emerged from the dark:

That genius beautiful and great.

And millennial trumpets poised, half lifted,

Millennial trumpets that wait.

Like the woods of old Kentucky

The memories of childhood

Arch up to where gold chariot wheels go ringing,

To where the precious airs are terraces and roadways

For witnesses to God, forever singing.

[Pg 176]

Like Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, the memories of childhood

Go in and in forever underground

To river and fountain of whispering and mystery

And many a haunted hall without a sound.

To Indian hoards and carvings and graveyards unexplored.

To pits so deep a torch turns to a star

Whirling ’round and going down to the deepest rocks of earth,

To the fiery roots of forests brave and far.

III

As I built cob-houses with small cousins on the floor:

(The talk was not meant for me).

Daguerreotypes shone. The back log sizzled

And my grandmother traced the family tree.

Then she swept to the proverbs of Campbell again.

And we glanced at the portrait of that most benign of men

Looking down through the evening gleam

With a bit of Andrew Jackson’s air,

More of Henry Clay

And the statesmen of Thomas Jefferson’s day:

With the face of age,

[Pg 177]

And the flush of youth,

And that air of going on, forever free.

For once upon a time ...

Long, long ago ...

In the holy forest land

There was a jolly pre-millennial band,

When that text-armed apostle, Alexander Campbell

Held deathless debate with the wicked “infi-del.”

The clearing was a picnic ground.

Squirrels were barking.

The seventeen year locust charged by.

Wild turkeys perched on high.

And millions of wild pigeons

Broke the limbs of trees,

Then shut out the sun, as they swept on their way.

But ah, the wilder dove of God flew down

To bring a secret glory, and to stay,

With the proud hunter-trappers, patriarchs that came

To break bread together and to pray

And oh the music of each living throbbing thing

When Campbell arose,

A pillar of fire,

The great high priest of the Spring.

[Pg 178]

He stepped from out the Brush Run Meeting House

To make the big woods his cathedrals,

The river his baptismal font,

The rolling clouds his bells,

The storming skies his waterfalls,

His pastures and his wells.

Despite all sternness in his word

Richer grew the rushing blood

Within our fathers’ coldest thought.

Imagination at the flood

Made flowery all they heard.

The deep communion cup

Of the whole South lifted up.

Who were the witnesses, the great cloud of witnesses

With which he was compassed around?

The heroes of faith from the days of Abraham

Stood on that blue-grass ground—

While the battle-ax of thought

Hewed to the bone

That the utmost generation

Till the world was set right

Might have an America their own.

For religion Dionysian

Was far from Campbell’s doctrine.

[Pg 179]

He preached with faultless logic

An American Millennium:

The social order

Of a realist and farmer

With every neighbor

Within stone wall and border.

And the tongues of flame came down

Almost in spite of him.

And now all but that Pentecost is dim.

I walk the forest by the Daniel Boone trail.

By guide posts quaint.

And the blazes are faint

In the rough old bark

Of silver poplars

And elms once slim,

Now monoliths tall.

I walk the aisle,

The cathedral hall

That is haunted still

With chariots dim,

Whispering still

With debate and call.

[Pg 180]

I come to you from Campbell.

Turn again, prodigal

Haunted by his name!

Artist, singer, builder,

The forest’s son or daughter!

You, the blasphemer

Will yet know repentance,

And Campbell old and grey

Will lead you to the dream-side

Of a pennyroyal river.

While your proud heart is shaken

Your confession will be taken

And your sins baptized away.

You, statesman-philosopher,

Sage with high conceit

Who speak of revolutions, in long words,

And guide the little world as best you may:

I come to you from Campbell

And say he rides your way

And will wait with you the coming of his day.

His horse still threads the forest,

Though the storm be roaring down....

[Pg 181]

Campbell enters now your log-house door.

Indeed you make him welcome, after many years,

While the children build cob-houses on the floor.

Let a thousand prophets have their due.

Let each have his boat in the sky.

But you were born for his secular millennium

With the old Kentucky forest blooming like Heaven,

And the red birds flying high.

THE END

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

LIST OF THE BOOKS OF VACHEL LINDSAY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A WORD ON CALIFORNIA, PHOTOPLAYS, AND SAINT FRANCIS

FIRST SECTION THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

KALAMAZOO

JOHN L. SULLIVAN, THE STRONG BOY OF BOSTON

BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN

RAMESES II

MOSES

A RHYME FOR ALL ZIONISTS

FOOTNOTES:

A MEDITATION ON THE SUN

DANTE

THE COMET OF PROPHECY

SHANTUNG, OR THE EMPIRE OF CHINA IS CRUMBLING DOWN

THE LAST SONG OF LUCIFER

SECOND SECTION A RHYMED SCENARIO, SOME POEM GAMES, AND THE LIKE

A DOLL’S “ARABIAN NIGHTS”

THE LAME BOY AND THE FAIRY

THE BLACKSMITH’S SERENADE

THE APPLE BLOSSOM SNOW BLUES

THE DANIEL JAZZ

WHEN PETER JACKSON PREACHED IN THE OLD CHURCH

THE CONSCIENTIOUS DEACON

DAVY JONES’ DOOR-BELL

THE SEA SERPENT CHANTEY

THE LITTLE TURTLE

THIRD SECTION COBWEBS AND CABLES

THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION

THE VISIT TO MAB

THE SONG OF THE STURDY SNAILS

ANOTHER WORD ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION

DANCING FOR A PRIZE

COLD SUNBEAMS

FOR ALL WHO EVER SENT LACE VALENTINES

MY LADY IS COMPARED TO A YOUNG TREE

TO EVE, MAN’S DREAM OF WIFEHOOD AS DESCRIBED BY MILTON

A KIND OF SCORN

HARPS IN HEAVEN

THE CELESTIAL CIRCUS

THE FIRE-LADDIE, LOVE

FOURTH SECTION RHYMES CONCERNING THE LATE WORLD WAR AND THE NEXT WAR

IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND JOYCE KILMER, POET AND SOLDIER

THE TIGER ON PARADE

THE FEVER CALLED WAR

STANZAS IN JUST THE RIGHT TONE FOR THE SPIRITED GENTLEMEN WHO WOULD CONQUER MEXICO

THE MODEST JAZZ-BIRD

THE STATUE OF OLD ANDREW JACKSON

SEW THE FLAGS TOGETHER

JUSTINIAN

THE VOICE OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

IN WHICH ROOSEVELT IS COMPARED TO SAUL

HAIL TO THE SONS OF ROOSEVELT

THE SPACIOUS DAYS OF ROOSEVELT

FIFTH SECTION RHYMES OF THE MIDDLE WEST AND SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS

WHEN THE MISSISSIPPI FLOWED IN INDIANA

THE FAIRY FROM THE APPLE-SEED

A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN

THE DREAM OF ALL THE SPRINGFIELD WRITERS

THE SPRINGFIELD OF THE FAR FUTURE

AFTER READING THE SAD STORY OF THE FALL OF BABYLON

ALEXANDER CAMPBELL

I—MY FATHERS CAME FROM KENTUCKY

II—WRITTEN IN A YEAR WHEN MANY OF MY PEOPLE DIED

III—A RHYMED ADDRESS TO ALL RENEGADE CAMPBELLITES, EXHORTING THEM TO RETURN

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

FIRST SECTION
THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES

SECOND SECTION
A RHYMED SCENARIO, SOME POEM GAMES, AND THE LIKE

THIRD SECTION
COBWEBS AND CABLES

FOURTH SECTION
RHYMES CONCERNING THE LATE WORLD WAR AND THE NEXT WAR

FIFTH SECTION
RHYMES OF THE MIDDLE WEST AND SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS