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

  _All rights reserved_




  COPYRIGHT, 1920,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 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.”




TABLE OF CONTENTS

                                                                    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

  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

  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




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 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 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 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 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.

“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 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 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.




FIRST SECTION

THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES




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.
  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.


_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
  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
  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
  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
  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:--

[Sidenote: 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.
  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._”




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!

  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.

  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.




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.
  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,
  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.
  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.




BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN

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


I

  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.
  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,
  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
  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,
  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.


II

  When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,
  Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,
  Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,
  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.
  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,
  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.
  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,
  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.


IV

  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.


V

  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.


VI

  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.

  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.




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.




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.




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.”


I

  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.


II

  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.
  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
  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.
  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.




A MEDITATION ON THE SUN


I

  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:

  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!


II

  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

  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:
  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.”




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.




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.
  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.




“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.




SHANTUNG, OR THE EMPIRE OF CHINA IS CRUMBLING DOWN

    _Dedicated to William Rose Benét_


I

  _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.
  _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.”


II

  _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.
  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.
  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:
  “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.”


IV

  _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
  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.


V

  _Slowly the generations pass--
  Like sand through Heaven’s blue hour-glass._

  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.

  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
  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,
  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.”




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_.

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.”




THE LAST SONG OF LUCIFER

_To Be Read Like a Meditation_


[Sidenote: _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
  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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _Music is holy, even in the infernal world._]

[Sidenote: _If Lucifer’s song could be completely remembered, one would
be willing to pay the great price._]

  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
  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
  And gloriously are seeking!

[Sidenote: NOW FOLLOWS WHAT EVERY DEMON SAYS IN HIS HEART, REMEMBERING
THAT TIME]

       *       *       *       *       *

       *       *       *       *       *


[Sidenote: _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
  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.

[Sidenote: _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,
  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....

[Sidenote: _How the song made the demons dream they were still fighting
for Satan._]

  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
  They drew from the strings a groan of glory:

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _How, at the climax of the song Lucifer almost restored the
first day of creation, when the Universe was happy and sinless._]

[Sidenote: _How the tears of the distracted demons become a
heaven-climbing flame._]

  Oh throbbing, sweet, enthralling spell!
  Madly, madly, oh my heart--
  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,
  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.

[Sidenote: _How Lucifer seemed to make himself God._]

  And just for a breath he conquered and reigned,
  For one quick pulse of time he stood;
  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.

[Sidenote: _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?

[Sidenote: _Demons and angels curse the singer._]

  So we cursed the harping of Lucifer
  The lyre was lost from his leper hands
  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.

[Sidenote: _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.




SECOND SECTION

A RHYMED SCENARIO, SOME POEM GAMES, AND THE LIKE




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.

[Sidenote: _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!_

  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.

  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.

[Sidenote: _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.
  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.

  _Oh quivering lights,
  Arabian Nights!
  Bagdad,
  Bagdad!_




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.

  “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_.

  “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
  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.
  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,
  Goldilocks, Santa Claus,
  Every beloved
  And heart-shaking name.”

  And the lame child
  And the fairy
  Journeyed far, far
  To the North Star.




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.
  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:--”
  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.
  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.




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,
  O
  You rag time lady,
  O
  You jazz dancing lady,
  O
  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.”

  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,
  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,
  The
  Rag
  Time
  Man.

[Sidenote: _Grand finale of jazz music, like the fall of a pile of
dishes in the kitchen._]




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._


[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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 kept a-praying:--“Lord save my soul.”

  Daniel was the butler, swagger and swell.
  He ran up stairs. He answered the bell.
  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.”
  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.

  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!”

[Sidenote: _Here the audience roars with the leader._]

  Thus roared the lions:--
  “We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,
  We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.
  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

[Sidenote: _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.
  Go chain the lions down.”

  And _Gabriel_ chained the lions,
  And _Gabriel_ chained the lions,
  And _Gabriel_ chained the lions,
  And Daniel got out of the den,
  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,”
  Darius said:--“You’re a Christian child,”
  And gave him his job again,
  And gave him his job again,
  And gave him his job again.




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.”
  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.




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--
  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.




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,
      “_Clang boom,
      Boom dong,
      Boom dong,
      Boom dong!_”




THE SEA SERPENT CHANTEY


I

  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.

[Sidenote: _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.”


II

  He waits by the door of his cave
  While the ages moan.
  He cracks the ribs of the ships
  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.


IV

  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.




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.




THIRD SECTION

COBWEBS AND CABLES




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!




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.

  “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.




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!

  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.

  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.




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._




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,
  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.”




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.”




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
  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.

  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.




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.




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.

  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.




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
  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.




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.




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,
  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.




THE FIRE-LADDIE, LOVE


  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.
  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.




FOURTH SECTION

RHYMES CONCERNING THE LATE WORLD WAR AND THE NEXT WAR




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
  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
  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!




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.




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.”




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.

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.




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.

  And Europe had not heard the like--
    And Germany went down!
  The fowl of steel with clashing claws
    Tore off the Kaiser’s crown.




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 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....”




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:--
  “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,
  Yes!
  By the Eternal!
  Old Andrew Jackson!




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.
  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,
  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.




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.




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.




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?

  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.”




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.

  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!_”




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,
  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.




FIFTH SECTION

RHYMES OF THE MIDDLE WEST AND SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS




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,
  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.




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.
  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.




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.

  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
  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.




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.

  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.




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
  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.




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?




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.




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,
  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.




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.




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


I

  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.


II

  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.
  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,
  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.

  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.
  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.


IV

  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.

  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....
  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.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.