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THE GREAT VALLEY
[Illustration: colophon]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE GREAT VALLEY
_By_
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
AUTHOR OF “SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY”,
“SONGS AND SATIRES,” ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1916.
Reprinted November, 1916.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO THE MEMORY
OF
SQUIRE DAVIS AND LUCINDA MASTERS
WHO, CLOSE TO NATURE, ONE IN DEEP RELIGIOUS FAITH, THE OTHER
IN PANTHEISTIC RAPTURE AND HEROISM, LIVED NEARLY A
HUNDRED YEARS IN THIS LAND OF ILLINOIS
I INSCRIBE
THE GREAT VALLEY
IN ADMIRATION OF THEIR GREAT STRENGTH, MASTERY
OF LIFE, HOPEFULNESS, CLEAR AND
BEAUTIFUL DEMOCRACY
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
CONTENTS
PAGE
FORT DEARBORN 1
CAPT. JOHN WHISTLER 5
EMILY BROSSEAU: IN CHURCH 12
THE OUIJA BOARD 19
HANGING THE PICTURE 21
LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS DEBATES 26
AUTOCHTHON 33
GRANT AND LOGAN AND OUR TEARS 43
THE MUNICIPAL PIER 49
GOBINEAU TO TREE 53
OLD PIERY 60
THE TYPICAL AMERICAN? 68
COME, REPUBLIC 72
PAST AND PRESENT 76
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 77
AT HAVANA 78
THE MOURNER’S BENCH 80
THE BAY WINDOW 83
MAN OF OUR STREET 90
ACHILLES DEATHERIDGE 93
SLIP SHOE LOVEY 95
THE ARCHANGELS 98
SONG OF CHANGE 101
MEMORABILIA 102
TO A SPIROCHÆTA 104
CATO BRADEN 106
WINSTON PRAIRIE 120
WILL BOYDEN LECTURES 125
THE DESPLAINES FOREST 129
THE GARDEN 131
THE TAVERN 134
O SAEPE MECUM 138
MALACHY DEGAN 141
MY DOG PONTO 144
THE GOSPEL OF MARK 147
MARSYAS 154
WORLDS BACK OF WORLDS 160
THE PRINCESS’ SONG 164
THE FURIES 166
APOLLO AT PHERÆ 168
STEAM SHOVEL CUT 173
THE HOUSES 178
THE CHURCH AND THE HOTEL 185
SUSIE 188
HAVING HIS WAY 190
THE ASP 198
THE FAMILY 206
THE SUBWAY 207
THE RADICAL’S MESSAGE 211
BOMBYX 216
THE APOLOGY OF DEMETRIUS 218
A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS 224
THEODORE DREISER 228
JOHN COWPER POWYS 231
NEW YEAR’S DAY 234
PLAYING BLIND 240
I SHALL NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN 241
ELIZABETH TO MONSIEUR D---- 244
MONSIEUR D---- TO THE PSYCHOANALYST 249
THE LAST CONFESSION 261
IN THE LOGGIA 268
BE WITH ME THROUGH THE SPRING 272
DESOLATE SCYTHIA 273
THE SEARCH 274
THE GREAT VALLEY
I
FORT DEARBORN
Here the old Fort stood
When the river bent southward.
Now because the world pours itself into Chicago
The Lake runs into the river
Past docks and switch-yards,
And under bridges of iron.
Sand dunes stretched along the lake for miles.
There was a great forest in the Loop.
Now Michigan Avenue lies
Between miles of lights,
And the Rialto blazes
Where the wolf howled.
In the loneliness of the log-cabin,
Across the river,
The fur-trader played his fiddle
When the snow lay
About the camp of the Pottawatomies
In the great forest.
Now to the music of the Kangaroo Hop,
And Ragging the Scale,
And La Seduccion,
The boys and girls are dancing
In a cafe near Lake Street.
The world is theirs now.
There is neither a past nor a to-morrow,
Save of dancing.
Nor do they know that behind them
In the seed not yet sown
There are eyes which will open upon Chicago,
And feet which will blossom for the dance,
And hands which will reach up
And push them into the silence
Of the old fiddler.
They threw a flag
Over the coffin of Lieutenant Farnum
And buried him back of the Fort
In ground where now
The spice mills stand.
And his little squaw with a baby
Sat on the porch grieving
While the band played.
Then hands pushing the world
Buried a million soldiers and afterward
Pale multitudes swept through the Court-house
To gaze for the last time
Upon the shrunken face of Lincoln.
And the fort at thirty-fifth street vanished.
And where the Little Giant lived
They made a park
And put his statue
Upon a column of marble.
Now the glare of the steel mills at South Chicago
Lights the bronze brow of Douglas.
It is his great sorrow
Haunting the Lake at mid-night.
When the South was beaten
They were playing
John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the Grave,
And Babylon is Fallen and Wake Nicodemus.
Now the boys and girls are dancing
To the Merry Whirl and Hello Frisco
Where they waltzed in crinoline
When the Union was saved.
There was the Marble Terrace
Glory of the seventies!
They wrecked it,
And brought colors and figures
From later Athens and Pompeii
And put them on walls.
And beneath panels of red and gold,
And shimmering tesseræ,
And tragic masks and comic masks,
And wreaths and bucrania,
Upon mosaic floors
Red lipped women are dancing
With dark men.
Some sit at tables drinking and watching,
Amorous in an air of French perfumes.
Like ships at mid-night
The kingdoms of the world
Know not whither they go nor to what port.
Nor do you, embryo hands,
In the seed not yet sown
Know of the wars to come.
They may fill the sky with armored dragons
And the waters with iron monsters;
They may build arsenals
Where now upon marble floors
The boys and girls
Are dancing the Alabama Jubilee,
The processional of time is a falling stream
Through which you thrust your hand.
And between the dancers and the silence forever
There shall be the livers
Gazing upon the torches they have lighted,
And watching their own which are failing,
And crying for oil,
And finding it not!
II
CAPTAIN JOHN WHISTLER
(_Captain John Whistler built Fort Dearborn in 1803. His son,
George Washington, who was an engineer and built a railroad in
Russia for the Czar in 1842, was the father of the artist, James
Abbott McNeill Whistler._)
Throw logs upon the fire! Relieve the guard
At the main gate and wicket gate! Lieutenant
Send two men ’round the palisades, perhaps
They’ll find some thirsty Indians loitering
Who may think there is whiskey to be had
After the wedding. Get my sealing wax!
Now let me see “November, eighteen four:
Dear Jacob: On this afternoon my daughter
Was married to James Abbott, it’s the first
Wedding of white people in Chicago--
That’s what we call Fort Dearborn now and then.
They left at once on horseback for Detroit.”
The “Tracy” will sail in to-morrow likely.
“To Jacob Kingsbury”--that’s well addressed.
Don’t fail to give this letter to the captain,
That it may reach Detroit ere they do.
I wonder how James Abbott and my Sarah
Will fare three hundred miles of sand and marsh,
And tangled forest in this hard November?
More logs upon the fire! The mist comes down!
The lake roars like a wind, and not a star
Lights up the blackness. They have almost reached
The Calumet by now. Good luck James Abbott!
I’m glad my Sarah wed so brave a man,
And one so strong of arm.
It’s eighteen four,
It’s almost eighteen five. It’s twenty years
Since I was captured when Burgoyne was whipped
At Saratoga. Why, it’s almost twenty
Since I became an American soldier. Now
Here am I builder of this frontier fort,
And its commander! Aged now forty-nine.
But in my time a British soldier first,
Now an American; first resident
Of Ireland, then England, Maryland,
Now living here. I see the wild geese fly
To distant shores from distant shores and wonder
How they endure such strangeness. But what’s that
To man’s adventures, change of home, what’s that
To my unsettled life? Why there’s La Salle:
They say La Salle in sixteen seventy-one
Was here, and now it’s almost eighteen five.
And what’s your wild geese to La Salle! He’s born
At Rouen, sails the seas, and travels over
Some several thousand miles through Canada.
Is here exploring portages and rivers.
Ends up at last down by the Rio Grande,
And dies almost alone half way around
The world from where he started. There’s a man!
May some one say of me: There was a man!...
I’m lonely without Sarah, without James.
Tom bring my pipe and that tobacco bag.
Here place my note to Jacob Kingsbury
There on the shelf--remember, to the captain
When the “Tracy” comes. Draw, boys, up to the fire
I’ll tell you what a wondrous dream I had,
And woke with on my Sarah’s wedding day....
I had an uncle back in Ireland
Who failed at everything except his Latin.
He could spout Virgil till your head would ache.
And when I was a boy he used to roll
The Latin out, translating as he went:
The ghost of Hector comes before Æneas,
And warns him to leave Troy. His mother Venus
Tells him to settle in another land!
The Delphic oracle misunderstood,
Æneas goes to Crete. He finds at last
His ships are fired by the Trojan women,
Great conflagration! Down he goes to hell,
And then the Sibyl shows him what’s to be:
What race of heroes shall descend from him,
And how a city’s walls he shall up-build
In founding Rome....
So last night in my dream
This uncle came to me and said to me:
“‘Aeneas’ Whistler you shall found a city.
You’ve built Fort Dearborn, that is the beginning.
Imperial Rome could be put in a corner
Of this, the city which you’ll found. Fear not
The wooden horse, but have a care for cows:
I see ships burning on your muddy Tiber,
And toppling walls.” I dreamed I felt the heat.
But then a voice said “Where’s your little boy
George Washington?”--come sit on father’s knee,
And hear about my dream--there little boy!
Well, as I said, I felt the heat and then
I felt the cruelest cold and then the voice:
“You cannot come to Russia with your boy,
He’ll make his way.” I woke up with these words,
And found the covers off and I was cold.
And then no sooner did I fall asleep
Than this old uncle re-appeared and said:
“A race of heroes shall descend from you,
Here shall a city stand greater than Rome.”
With that he seemed to alter to a witch,
A woman’s form, the voice of him changed too,
And said: “I’m Mother Shipton, Captain Whistler.
“Men through the mountains then shall ride,
“Nor horse nor ass be by their side”--
Think, gentlemen, what it would be to ride
In carriages propelled by steam! And then
This dream became a wonder in a wonder
Of populous streets, of flying things, of spires
Of driven mist that looked like fiddle strings
From tree to tree. Of smoke-stacks over-topping
The tallest pine; of bridges built of levers,
And such a haze of smoke, and cloud like shapes
Passing along like etchings one by one:
Cathedrals, masts as thick as hazel thickets,
And buildings great as hills, and miles of lights.
Till by some miracle the sun had moved,
And rose not in the east but in the south.
And shone along the shore line of the Lake,
As he shines o’er the Lake when he arises,
And makes an avenue of gold, no less
This yellow sand took glory of his light.
And where he shone it seemed an avenue,
And over it, where now the dunes stretch south,
Along the level shore of sand, there stood
These giant masses, etchings as it were!
And Mother Shipton said: “This is your city.
“A race of heroes shall descend from you;
“Your son George Washington shall do great deeds.
“And if he had a son what would you name him?”
Well, as I went to sleep with thoughts of Sarah
And praises for James Abbott, it was natural
That I should say “I’d name him after James.”
“Well done” said Mother Shipton and then vanished....
I woke to find the sun-light in my room,
And from my barracks window saw the Lake
Stirred up to waves slate-colored by the wind;
Some Indians loitering about the fort.
They knew this was James Abbott’s wedding day,
And Sarah’s day of leaving.
Soldiers! Comrades!
What is most real, our waking hours, our dreams?
Where was I in this sleep? What are our dreams
But lands which lie below our hour’s horizon,
Yet still are seen in a reflecting sky,
And which through earth and heaven draw us on?
Look at me now! Consider of yourselves:
Housed, fed, yet lonely, in this futile task
By this great water, in this waste of grass,
Close to this patch of forest, on this river
Where wolves howl, and the Indian waits his chance--
Consider of your misery, your sense
Of worthless living, living to no end:
I tell you no man lives but to some end.
He may live only to increase the mass
Wherewith Fate is borne-down, or just to swell
The needed multitude when the hero passes,
To give the hero heart! But every man
Walks, though in blindness, to some destiny
Of human growth, who only helps to fill,
And helps that way alone, the empty Fate
That waits for lives to give it Life.
And look
Here are we housed and fed, here is a fire
And here a bed. A hundred years ago
Marquette, La Salle, scarce housed and poorly fed
Gave health and life itself to find the way
Through icy marshes, treacherous swamps and forests
For this Fort Dearborn, where to-night we sit
Warming ourselves against a roaring hearth.
And what’s our part? It is not less than theirs.
And what’s the part of those to come? Not less
Than ours has been! And what’s the life of man?
To live up to the God in him, to obey
The Voice which says: You shall not live and rest.
Nor sleep, nor mad delight nor senses fed,
Nor memory dulled, nor tortured hearing stopped
To drown my Voice shall leave you to forget
Life’s impulse at the heart of Life, to strive
For men to be, for cities, nobler states
Moving foreshadowed in your dreams at night,
And realized some hundred years to come.
When this Fort Dearborn, you and all of you,
And I who sit with pipe and son on knee,
Regretting a dear daughter, who this hour
Is somewhere in the darkness (like our souls
Which move in darkness, listening to the beat
Of our mysterious hearts, or with closed eyes
Sensing a central Purpose) shall be dust--
Our triumphs, sorrows, even our names forgotten.
And all we knew lost in the wreck and waste
And change of things. And even what we did
For cities, nobler states, and greater men
Forgotten too. It matters not. We work
For cities, nobler states and greater men,
Or else we die in Life which is the death
Which soldiers must not die!
III
EMILY BROSSEAU: IN CHURCH
_Domine, Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium
defunctorum de poenis inferni, et de profundo lacu._
Leave me now and I will watch here through the night,
And I’ll put in new candles, if these fail.
I’ll sit here as I am, where I can see
His brow, his nose’s tip and thin white hair,
And just beyond his brow, above the altar,
The red gash in the side of Jesus like
A candle’s flame when burning to the socket.
Go all of you, and leave me. I don’t care
How cold the church grows. Michael Angelo
Went to a garret, which was cold, and stripped
His feet, and painted till the chill of death
Took hold of him, a man just eighty-seven,
And I am ninety, what’s the odds?--go now ...
Now Jean we are alone! Your very stillness
Is like intenser life, as in your brow
Your soul was crystallized and made more strong,
And nearer to me. You are here, I feel you.
I close my eyes and feel you, you are here.
Therefore a little talk before the dawn,
Which will come soon. Dawn always comes too soon
In times like this. It waits too long in times
Of absence, and you will be absent soon....
I want to talk about my happiness,
My happy life, the part you played in it.
There never was a day you did not kiss me
Through nearly seventy years of married life.
I had two hours of heaven in my life.
The first one was the dance where first we met.
The other when last fall they brought me roses,
Those ninety roses for my birth-day, when
They had me tell them of the first Chicago
I saw when just a child, about the Fort;
The cabins where the traders lived, who worked,
And made the fortune of John Jacob Astor.
Poor Jean! It’s scarce a week since you were struck.
You sat down in your chair, ’twas after dinner,
Then suddenly I saw your head fall forward.
You could not speak when I went over to you.
But afterwards when you were on the bed
I leaned above you and you took the ribbon,
That hung down from my cap and pressed it trembling
Against your lips. What triumph in your death!
Your death was like a mass, mysterious, rich
Like Latin which the priests sing and the choir--
May angels take you and with Lazarus,
Once poor, receive you to eternal rest....
Two hours of heaven in my life that’s true!
And years between that made life more than good.
My first sight of Chicago stands for all
My life became for you and all I’ve lived.
The year is 1829, you know of course.
I’ve told you of the trip in Prairie schooners
From Ft. Detroit round the lake, we camped
Along the way, the last time near the place
Where Gary and the steel mills are to-day.
And the next morning what a sky! as blue
As a jay’s wing, with little rifts of snow
Along the hollows of the yellow dunes,
And some ice in the lake, which lapped a little,
And purplish colors far off in the north.
So round these more than twenty miles we drove
That April day. And when we came as far
As thirty-ninth or thirty-first perhaps--
Just sand hills then--I never can forget it--
What should I see? Fort Dearborn dazzling bright,
All newly white-washed right against that sky,
And the log cabins round it, far away
The rims of forests, and between a prairie
With wild flowers in the grasses red and blue--
Such wild flowers and such grasses, such a sky,
Such oceans of sweet air, in which were rising
Straight up from Indian wigwams spires of smoke,
About where now the Public Library stands
On Randolph Street. And as we neared the place
There was the flag, a streaming red and white
Upon a pole within the Fort’s inclosure.
I cried for happiness though just a child,
And cry now thinking....
I must set this candle
To see your pale brow better! What’s the hour?
The night is passing, and I have so much
To say to you before the dawn....
Well, then
The first hour that I call an hour of heaven:
Who was that man that built the first hotel?--
It stood across the river from the Fort--
No matter. But before that I had heard
Nothing beside a fiddle, living here
Amid the traders eleven years or so.
And this man for his hotel’s opening
Had brought an orchestra from somewhere. Think
Bass viols, violins, and horns and flutes.
I’m dressed up like a princess for those days.
I’m sixteen years of age and pass the door,
Enter the ball-room where such candle-light
As I had never seen shone on me, they
Bored sockets in suspended wheels of wood
And hung them from the ceiling, chandeliers!
And at that moment all the orchestra
Broke into music, yes, it was a waltz!
And in that moment--what a moment-full!
This hotel man presented you and said
You were my partner for the evening. Jean
I call this heaven, for its youth and love!
I’m sixteen and you’re twenty and I love you.
I slip my arm through yours for you to lead me,
You are so strong, so ruddy, kind and brave.
I want you for a husband, for a friend,
A guide, a solace, father to the child
That I can bear. Oh Jean how can I talk so
In this lone church at mid-night of such things,
With all these candles burning round your face.
I who have rounded ninety-years, and look
On what was sweet, long seventy years ago?
Feeling this city even at mid-night move
In restlessness, desire, around this church,
Where once I saw the prairie grass and flowers;
And saw the Indians in their colored trappings
Pour from a bottle of whisky on the fire
A tribute to the Spirit of the world,
And dance and sing for madness of that Spirit?
Well, Jean, my other hour. I’ve spoken before
Of our long life together glad and sad,
But mostly good. I’m happy for it all.
This other hour is marked, I call it heaven
Just as I told you, not because they stood
Around me as a mystery from the past,
And looked at me admiringly for my age,
My strength in age, my life that spanned the growth
Of my Chicago from a place of huts,
Just four or five, a fort, and all around it
A wilderness, to what it is this hour
Where most three million souls are living, nor
Because I saw this rude life, and beheld
The World’s Fair where such richnesses of time
Were spread before me--not because of these,
Nor for the ninety roses, nor the tribute
They paid me in them, nor their gentle words--
These did not make that hour a heaven, no--
Jean, it was this:
First I was just as happy
As I was on that night we danced together.
And that I could repeat that hour’s great bliss
At ninety years, though in a different way,
And for a different cause, that was the thing
That made me happy. For you see it proves,
Just give the soul a chance it’s happiness
Is endless, let the body house it well,
Or house it ill, but give it but a chance
To speak itself, not stifle it, or hush it
With hands of flesh against the quivering strings,
Made sick or weak by time, the soul will find
Delights as good as youth has to the end.
And even if the flesh be sick there’s Heine:
Few men had raptures keen as his, though lying
With death beside him through a stretch of years.
It must be something in the soul as well,
Which makes me think a third hour shall be mine
In spite of death, yes Jean it must be so!
I want that third hour, I shall pray for it
Unceasingly, I want it for my soul’s sake:
Which will have happiness in its very power
And dignity that time nor change can hurt.
For if I have it you shall have it too.
And in that third hour we shall give each other
Something that’s kindred to the souls we gave
That night we danced together--but much more!...
It’s dawn! Good bye till then, my Jean, good bye!
IV
THE OUIJA BOARD
(_David Kennison died in Chicago February 24th, 1852, aged 115
years, 3 months and 17 days. Veteran of the Revolution._)
David Kennison is here born at Kingston in the year
Seventeen thirty-seven and it’s nineteen sixteen now,
Dumped the tea into the harbor, saw Cornwallis’ career
End at Yorktown with the sullen thunder written on his brow.
Was at West Point when the traitor Arnold gave up the fort,
Saw them hang Major Andre for a spy and his due.
Settled down in Sackett’s Harbor for a rest of a sort,
Till I crossed the western country in the year forty-two.
And I saw Chicago rising in the ten years to come,
Ere I passed in the fifties to the peace of the dead.
Now where is there a city in the whole of Christendom
Where such roar is and such walking is around a grave’s head?
Oh, ’twas fighting as a soldier in the wars of the land;
And ’twas giving and living to make the people free
That kept me past a century an oak to withstand
The heat and snow and weevils that break down a tree.
There were other dead around me with a slab to mark
When they heaped the final pillow for my honor’s meed.
Now the lovers stopping curiously in Lincoln Park
Look at the bronze tablet on my boulder and read:
How I fought at Long Island and fought at White Plains--
What does it mean you lovers who scan what is scored
On the tablet on my boulder?--Why the task remains
To make the torch brighter and to keep clean the sword.
Go labor for the future. Go make the cities great:
There are other realms to conquer for the men to be.
For it’s toil and it’s courage that solve a soul’s fate,
And it’s giving and living that make a people free!
V
HANGING THE PICTURE
Before you pull that string,
And strip away that veil,
I rise to enter my objection
To the hanging of Archer Price’s picture
Here in this hall....
For I’ll venture the artist has tried to soften
The vain and shifty look of the eyes;
And the face that looked like a harte-beest’s,
And the rabbit mouth that looked like a horse’s,
Lipping oats from a leather bag!
I knew this man in ’28
When he drifted here from Maine, he said.
And now it’s eighteen ninety two:
This year is sacred to conquerors,
Discoverers and soldiers.
And I object to the hanging of pictures
Of men who trade while others fight,
And follow the army to get the loot,
And rest till other men are tired,
Then grab the spoils while the workers sleep.
I would like to burn all masks,
And padded shoes,
And smash all dark lanterns.
And take all friends of the people
And brand them with the letter “B,”
Which means “Betrayer.”
And I would like to enter the Kingdom of Heaven
Just to see the publicans who will be there,
And the Archer Prices who will not be there!
You call him a great man,
And a prophetic man,
And a leader, and a savior,
And a man who was wise in an evil world
Of tangled interests and selfish power,
And who knew the art of compromise,
And how to get half when you can’t get all!
You haven’t probed deep enough in this man.
For he was great as the condor is great.
And prophetic as the wolf is prophetic.
And a leader as the jackal is a leader.
And his wisdom was that of the python,
Which will swallow a hare when no pig is at hand!
He was rich,
He was well known,
His name was linked with lofty things,
And adorned all noble committees.
And he was a friend of art and music--
He gave them money!
He was on the Library Board,
And the Commerce Board, and every board
For building up the city--
I admit these things. They were pawns on the board for him.
That’s why I rise to enter my objection
To hanging his picture here!
We had no telephones in those days.
But there was a certain man of power,
A man who was feared, as one might fear
A lion that hides in the jungle.
And this man sat in a hidden room
As a banded-epira waits and watches.
And he went from this room to his house in a cab,
And back to this room in a cab.
But everyone knew that Archer Price
Was doing the will of the man in the room,
Though you never saw the two together,
As you never could see together the leaders
Of some of these late bi-partisan deals.
But Archer Price was so much alike
This secret man in the room;
And did so much what we knew
He wanted done, and built the city
So near to the heart’s desire of this man
That all of us knew that the two conferred
In spite of the fact that telephones
Had never been heard of then....
Well, because of this man in the room,
As well as because of Price himself,
Everyone feared him, no one knew
Exactly how to fight him.
Everyone hated him, although
Everyone helped him to wealth and power.
He was what you’d call a touch-me-not.
If you clodded him you ran the risk
Of hitting the teacher, or maybe a child.
He always walked with the wind to his back:
If you spit at him it would fly in your face.
And though we suspected more than we knew
Of his subtle machinations,
No one could attack him for what was known.
Because the things he was known to be doing
Were service to those, who couldn’t allow
The service to be imperiled.
There never was a time
This man was out of public office.
He clung to the people’s treasury
As a magnet clings to a magnet.
Why didn’t your orator tell this audience
He started in life as town assessor?
That would have left me with nothing to say
Except he traded the fixing of taxes
For business!
Oh, you people who unveil pictures!
In his day no one was permitted to say this.
And now everyone has forgotten it.
It is useless to say it.
And here in the year of Columbus
You are unveiling his picture!
And you say the Illinois and Michigan Canal
Had never been built or saved for the people
Except for Archer Price!
Why don’t you tell that he fought the Canal in 1830,
Saying it would burden the people?
And why don’t you say that even then
He was acting for his own interests and the man in the room?
Why don’t you show that his art of compromise
Created the Public Canal Committee
When he failed to block the Canal,
And failed of appointment as Canal Commissioner?
Why don’t you show that through that committee
The squatters stole the wharves on the river?
Why don’t you show how his friends grew rich
Through buying the lands at public sales
Which were given to build the Canal,
And which the Committee was pretending to conserve?
Why don’t you show that through that Committee,
Pretending to be a friend of the people,
He opened a fight at length on the squatters
And won the fight, and won the wharves
For himself and a clique of friends?
Why don’t you tell--?
Cry me down if you will--
I object--I object--
VI
THE LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS DEBATES
Have you ever seen the Douglas monument
There in Chicago?
They say it’s by the Lake,
With a column of marble a hundred feet high,
And a statue of The Little Giant on top,
With knit brows and lion face,
Like he used to look when debatin’ with Linkern.
I want to go up to Chicago sometime,
To see that monument.
And some one told me
They carved on his marble coffin the words:
“Tell my children to obey the laws,
And uphold the constitution.”
Well, they couldn’t have put sadder words
On his coffin than that.
For it was tryin’ to obey the laws and support the
constitution
That killed him.
And why should his children do the same thing and die?
You young men of this day don’t care,
And you don’t understand the old questions.
But a man’s life is always worth understanding,
Especially a man’s like The Little Giant.
Now this was the point:
There was that devilish thing slavery,
And The Little Giant, as senator,
Put through a bill for leaving it to the people
Whether they would have slavery in Kansas or Nebraska,
Or any other territory, and that was popular sovereignty--
And sounds democratic; but three years later
Along comes the Supreme Court and says:
The people of a territory must have slavery
Whether they want it or not, because
The constitution is for slavery, and it follows the flag!
Well, there was The Little Giant
Caught between the law and the constitution!
And tryin’ to obey ’em both!
Or better still he was like Lem Reese’s boy
Who was standin’ one time one foot on shore,
And one in a skiff, baitin’ a hook,
And all at once Col. Lankford’s little steamer
Came along and bobbled the skiff;
And it started to glide out into the river,--
Why the boy walked like a spread compass
For a month.
For the skiff was movin’, and that’s the law.
And his other foot slipped on the slimy bank,
And that’s the constitution!
But if you want to consider a minute
How Time plays tag with people,
And how no one can tell
When he’ll be It, just think:
There was Bill McKinley
Who kept the old constitution’s from goin’ to the Philippines,
And they elected him.
And here was The Little Giant,
Who wanted to send it everywhere,
And they defeated him.
So you see it depends on what it means
Whether you want to keep it or send it.
And nobody knows what it means--
Not even judges.
But just the same them were great days.
One time The Little Giant came here with Linkern
And talked from the steps of the Court-house;
And you never saw such a crowd of people:
Democrats, Whigs, and Locofocos,
Know-nothings and Anti-masonics,
Blue lights, Spiritualists, Republicans
Free Soilers, Socialists, Americans--such a crowd.
Linkern’s voice squeaked up high,
And didn’t carry.
But Douglas!
People out yonder in Proctor’s Grove,
A mile from the Court House steps,
Could hear him roar and hear him say:
“I’m going to trot him down to Egypt
And see if he’ll say the things he says
To the black republicans in northern Illinois.”
It made you shiver all down your spine
To see that face and hear that voice--
And that was The Little Giant!
And then on the other hand there was
Abe Linkern standing six foot four,
As thin as a rail, with a high-keyed voice,
And sometimes solemn, and sometimes comic
As any clown you ever saw,
And runnin’ Col. Lankford’s little steamer,
As it were, you know, which would bobble the skiff,
Which was the law; and The Little Giant’s other foot
Would slip on the bank, which was the constitution.
And you could almost hear him holler “ouch.”
And Linkern would say: This argument
Of the Senator’s is thin as soup
Made from the shadow of a starved pigeon!
And then the crowd would yell, and the cornet band
Would play, and men would walk away and say:
Linkern floored him. And others would say:
He aint no match for The Little Giant.
But I’ll declare if I could decide
Which whipped the other.
For to let the people decide whether they wanted slavery
Sounded good.
And to have the constitution in force sounded good.
And not to have any slavery at all sounded good.
But so far as the law was concerned,
And where it was, and what you could do with it
It was like the shell game:
Now you see the little ball and now you don’t!
Who’s got a dollar to say where the little ball is?
But when you try to obey the laws and support the constitution,
It reminds me of a Campbellite preacher
We had here years ago.
And he debated with the Methodist preacher
As to whether immersion or sprinkling
Was the way to salvation.
And the Campbellite preacher said:
“The holy scripture says:
‘And Jesus when he was baptised
Went up straightway out of the water.’
And how could he come up out of the water
If he wasn’t in?” asked the Campbellite preacher,
Pointing a long finger at the Methodist preacher.
“And how could he be in without being immersed?”
Well, the Campbellite preacher won the debate.
But the next day Billy Bell,
An infidel we had here,
Met the Campbellite preacher and said:
“I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for a man
To stand in water up to his knees
And have water sprinkled on his head, would it?”
And the Campbellite preacher said:
“Get thee behind me Satan,” and went on.
Well Linkern was kind of an infidel,
And The Little Giant got caught in his own orthodoxy,
And his ability for debate led him into
The complete persuading of himself.
And by arguin’ for the law
He made Linkern appear
As bein’ against the law.
But just think, for a minute, young man:
Here is The Little Giant the greatest figure in all the land
And the wheel of fortune turns
And he stands by Linkern’s side and holds
His hat while Linkern takes the oath
As president!
Then the war comes and his leadership
Has left him, and millions who followed him
Turn from him, and then Death comes,
And sits by him and says: Your time’s up!
So I say when they put up that monument
And carved those words upon it
They had just as well have carved the words,
“He took poison.”
Which reminds me:
There was a family over at Dutchland
Named Nitchie.
And my boy writes me from college
That there is a writer named Nitchie
Who says--well I can’t tell you just now.
But if you’ll look at things close
You’ll see that Linkern was against the legal law,
And Douglas against the moral law so-called,
And neither cared for the other’s law--
And that was the real debate!
Linkern rode over laws to save the Union,
And Douglas said he cared more for white supremacy
Than anything else.
Which being true, who can tell
Who won the debates?
Is it better to have the Union,
Or better to have a master race?
I’ll go over to the post-office now
And see if there’s a letter from my boy.
VII
AUTOCHTHON
In a rude country some four thousand miles
From Charles’ and Alfred’s birthplace you were born,
In the same year. But Charles and you were born
On the same day, and Alfred six months later.
Thus start you in a sense the race together....
Charles goes to Edinburgh, afterwards
His father picks him for the ministry,
And sends him off to Cambridge where he spends
His time on beetles and geology,
Neglects theology. Alfred is here
Fondling a Virgil and a Horace.
But you--these years you give to reading Æsop,
The Bible, lives of Washington and Franklin,
And Kirkham’s grammar.
In 1830 Alfred prints a book
Containing “Mariana,” certain other
Delicate, wind-blown bells of airy music.
And in this year you move from Indiana
And settle near Decatur, Illinois,
Hard by the river Sangamon where fever
And ague burned and shook the poor
Swamp saffron creatures of that desolate land.
While Alfred walks the flowering lanes of England,
And reads Theocritus to the song of larks
You clear the forests, plow the stumpy land,
Fight off the torments of mosquitoes, flies
And study Kirkham’s grammar.
In 1831 Charles takes a trip
Around the world, sees South America,
And studies living things in Galapagos,
Tahiti, Keeling Island and Tasmania.
In 1831 you take a trip
Upon a flat-boat down to New Orleans
Through hardships scarcely less than Joliet
And Marquette knew in 1673,
Return on foot to Orfutt’s store at Salem.
By this time Jacques Rousseau was canonized;
Jefferson dead but seven years or so;
Brook Farm was budding, Garrison had started
His _Liberator_, Fourier still alive;
And Emerson was preening his slim wings
For flights into broad spaces--there was stir
Enough to sweep the Shelleyan heads,--in truth
Shelley was scarcely passed a decade then.
Old Godwin still was writing, wars for freedom
Swept through the Grecian Isles, America
Had “isms” in abundance, but not one
Took hold of you.
In 1832 Alfred has drawn
Out of old Mallory and Grecian myths
The “Lady of Shalott” and fair “Œnone,”
And put them into verse.
This is the year you fight the Black Hawk war,
And issue an address to Sangamon’s people.
You are but twenty-three, yet this address
Would not shame Charles or Alfred; it’s restrained,
And sanely balanced, without extra words,
Or youth’s conceits, or imitative figures, dreams
Or “isms” of the day. No, here you hope
That enterprise, morality, sobriety
May be more general, and speak a word
For popular education, so that all
May have a “moderate education” as you say.
You make a plea for railroads and canals,
And ask the suffrages of the people, saying
You have known disappointment far too much
To be chagrined at failure, if you lose.
They take you at your word and send another
To represent them in the Legislature.
Then you decide to learn the blacksmith’s trade.
But Fate comes by and plucks you by the sleeve,
And changes history, doubtless.
By ’36 when Charles returns to England
You have become a legislator; yes
You tried again and won. You have become
A lawyer too, by working through the levels
Of laborer, store-keeper and surveyor,
Wrapped up in problems of geometry,
And Kirkham’s grammar and Sir William Blackstone,
And Coke on Littleton, and Joseph Chitty.
Brook Farm will soon bloom forth, Francois Fourier
Is still on earth, and Garrison is shaking
Terrible lightning at Slavocracy.
And certain libertarians, _videlicet_
John Greenleaf Whittier and others, sing
The trampling out of grapes of wrath; in truth
The Hebrews taught the idealist how to sing
Destruction in the name of God and curse
Where strength was lacking for the sword--but you
Are not a Robert Emmet, or a Shelley,
Have no false dreams of dying to bring in
The day of Liberty. At twenty-three
You’re measuring the world and waiting for
Dawn’s mists to clear that you may measure it,
And know the field’s dimensions ere you put
Your handle to the plow.
In 1833 a man named Hallam,
A friend of Alfred’s, died at twenty-two.
Thereafter Alfred worked his hopes and fears
Upon the dark impasto of this loss
In delicate colors. And in 1850
When you were sunk in melancholia,
As one of no use in the world, adjudged
To be of no use by your time and place,
Alfred brought forth his Dante dream of life,
Received the laureate wreath and settled down
With a fair wife amid entrancing richness
Of sunny seas and silken sails and dreams
Of Araby,
And ivied halls, and meadows where the breeze
Of temperate England blows the hurrying cloud.
There, seated like an Oriental king
In silk and linen clothed took the acclaim
Of England and the world!...
This is the year
You sit in a little office there in Springfield,
Feet on the desk and brood. What are you thinking?
You’re forty-one; around you spears are whacking
The wind-mills of the day, you watch and weigh.
The sun-light of your mind quivers about
The darkness every thinking soul must know,
And lights up hidden things behind the door,
And in dark corners. You have fathomed much,
Weighed life and men. O what a spheréd brain,
Strong nerved, fresh blooded, firm in plasmic fire,
And ready for a task, if there be one!
That is the question that makes brooding thought:
For you know well men come into the world
And find no task, and die, and are not known--
Great spheréd brains gone into dust again,
Their light under a bushel all their days!
In 1859, Charles publishes
His “Origin of Species,” and ’tis said
You see it, or at least hear what it is.
Out of three travelers in a distant land
One writes a book of what the three have seen.
Perhaps you never read much, yet perhaps
Some books were just a record of your mind.
How had it helped you in your work to read
The “Idylls of the King”? As much, perhaps,
Had Alfred read the Northwest Ordinance
Of 1787....
But in this year
Of ’59 you’re sunk in blackest thought
About the country maybe, but, I think,
About this riddle of our mortal life.
You were a poet, Abraham, from your birth.
That makes you think, and makes you deal at last
With things material to the tune of laws
Moving in higher spaces when you’re called
To act--and show a poet moulding stuff
Too tough for spirits practical to mould.
Here are you with your feet upon the desk.
You have been beaten in a cause which kept
Some strings too loose to catch the vibrate waves
Of a great Harp whose music you have sensed.
You are a mathematician using symbols
Like Justice, Truth, with keenness to perceive
Disturbance of equations, a logician
Who sees invariable laws, and beauty born
Of finding out and following the laws.
You are a Plato brooding there in Springfield.
You are a poet with a voice for Truth,
And never to be claimed by visionaries
Who chant the theme of bread and bread alone.
But here and now
They want you not for Senator, it seems.
You have been tossed to one side by the rush
Of world events, left stranded and alone,
And fitted for no use, it seems, in Springfield.
A country lawyer with a solid logic,
And gift of prudent phrase which has a way
Of hardening under time to rock as hard
As the enduring thought you seal it with.
You’ve reached your fiftieth year, your occultation
Should pass. If ever, we should see a light:
In all your life you have not seen a city.
But now our Springfield giant strides Broadway,
Thrills William Cullen Bryant, sets a wonder
Going about the East, that Kirkham’s grammar
Can give a man such speech at Cooper Union,
Which even Alfred’s, trained to Virgil’s style,
Cannot disdain for matching in the thought
With faultless clearness.
And still in 1860 all the Brahmins
Have fear to give you power.
You are a backwoodsman, a country lawyer
Unlettered in the difficult art of states.
A denizen of a squalid western town,
Dowered with a knack of argument alone,
Which wakes the country school-house, and may lift
Its devotees to Congress by good fortune.
But then at Cooper Union intuitive eyes
Had measured your tall frame, and careful speech,
Your strength and self-possession. Then they came
With that dramatic sense which is American
Into the hall with rails which you had split,
And called you Honest Abe, and wearing badges
With your face on them and the poor catch words
Of Honest Abe, as if you were a referee
Like Honest Kelly, when in truth no man
Had ever been your intimate, ever slapped you
With brisk familiarity, or called you
Anything but Mr. Lincoln, never
Abe, or Abraham, and never used
The Hello Bill of salutation to you--
O great patrician, therefore fit to be
Great democrat as well!
In 1862 Charles publishes
“How Orchid Flowers are Fertilized by Insects,”
And you give forth a proclamation saying
“The Union must have peace, or I wipe out
The blot of negro slavery. You see,
The symphony’s the thing, and if you mar it,
Contending over slavery, I remove
The source of the disharmony. I admit
The freedom of the press--but for the Union.
When you abuse the Union, you shall stop.
And when you are in jail, no habeas corpus
Shall bring relief--I have suspended it.”
To-day they call you libertarian--
Well, so you were, but just as Beauty is,
And Truth is, even if they curb and vanquish
The lower heights of beauty and of truth.
They take your speech and deeds and give you place
In Hebrew temples with Ezekiel,
Habakkuk and Isaiah--you emerge
From this association, master man!
You are not of the faith that breeds the ethic
Wranglers, who make economic goals
The strain and test of life. You are not one,
Spite of your lash and sword threat, who believe
God will avenge the weak. That is the dream
Which builds millenniums where disharmonies
That make the larger harmony shall cease--
A dream not yours. And they shall lose you who
Enthrone you as a prophet who cut through
The circle of our human sphere of life
To let in wrath and judgments, final tests
On Life around the price of sparrows, weights
Wherewith bread shall be weighed....
There is a windless flame where cries and tears,
Where hunger, strife, and war and human blood
No shadow cast, and where the love of Truth,
Which is not love of individual souls,
Finds solace in a Judgment of our life.
That is the Flame that took both Charles and You--
O leader in a Commonwealth of Thought!
VIII
GRANT AND LOGAN AND OUR TEARS
’Twixt certain parallels of latitude;
Say thirty-seven and forty-two and more;
And certain meridians, say ninety-one
And eighty-seven plus.
The top line drawn to leave the lower lake
Shaped like a drinking cup to meet your needs;
To bind you to the east and west,
Save you from tributary servitude
Through Mississippi’s River to the south.
No sheds of hills to guard you on the north
Against the arctic winds loosed at the pole,
Or Medicine Hat parturient as the bag
Of Mad Æolus.
The valley and the river just a hall-way
Making a draft for tropic heat in summer--
Well, here you are in physiography.
Upon a time black soil was poured
Over your surface as the cook
Pours chocolate on a cake.
So you are fertile, never a land so rich.
A little river flowing in the lake
Vanishing in marshes up a mile or so
Makes for a portage to another stream
Which empties in another stream which empties
Into the Mississippi.
A spot between the lake and river lies
Upon the highway binding east and west,
And from the south and north where traders meet.
This is the very place to build a fort--
The fort becomes a town within a year,
A great metropolis in half a cycle.
Within a lifetime you have gained
Some seven million souls.
The land of Luther sends a swarming host;
And Milton’s land adventurous sons;
And Scandinavia’s realm,
And Michael Angelo’s mountains,
All Europe pours her wealth
Of brawn and spirit on you,
Until you are an empire
Of restless vital men, and teeming towns.
Before you were grown rich,
And populous
You brightened history;
Great men came from you.
But now that you have cities and great treasure
Where are your great ones?
What is your genius?
What star enwraps your eyes?
What heights allure you?
Hermaphroditic giant, sad and drunk
Not gay, but foolish, stuffed with new baked bread,
Who took away your gland pituitary,
Abandoned you to such exaggerate growth
Without increase of soul?
You blasphemous, yet afraid,
Licentious, yet ashamed,
Swaggering, yet blubbering
And boasting of your rights.
Materialist who woos the spiritual,
Who holds aloft the cross from which you’ve sold
The nails to junk-men.
And makes a hackle from the crown of thorns
Wherewith to hackle hemp to make a rope
For your own hanging in the Philippines!
Who with one hand grabs off the widow’s mite,
And with the other tosses golden coins
Into the beggar’s cup.
The black-snake whip in one hand, in the other
A plentiful supply of surgeon’s tape. Oh you!
A hard oppressor, charitably inclined,
And keen to see and take the outward image--
Devoid of categories to reduce
Its truth and meaning.
No seed of old world thistles should be sown here,
Or let to fly upon this soil.
Yet dogma has been sown here
Men rise thereby who sow the seed again;
Accessory spirits keep the ground well stirred.
It’s gold and then it’s power, but gold at last.
And for the rest what are your dominant breeds?
Smug cultures where the aggregate mind is leather
Gorged with the oil respectability
Impervious to thought.
These pick the eunuch type as being safe,
American, it’s called:
Sleek, quiet, smiling, ready servitors
Who for the salary, and that alone,
(Require no bribes)
Effect the business will.
You are a hollow thing of steel, a cauldron,
No monument of freedom.
You’re lettered, it is true,
With many luminous truths that came to be
Through deeds of men who died for liberty.
But inside you there is a seething compost
Of public schools, the ballot, journalism,
Laws, jurisprudence, dogma, gold the chief
Ingredient all stirred into a brew
Wherewith to feed yourself and keep yourself
The thing you are!
Not wholly slave, not really free,
Desiring vaguely to be master moral,
And yet too sicklied over by old truths,
The ballot, fear, plebian spirit, lack of mind,
To reach patrician levels--
Hermaphroditic giant, misty-eyed,
Half blinded by ideals, half by greed!
Can nothing but a war,
The prospect of a slaughter or the prize
Of foreign lands, shake off your lethargy,
And make you seem as big in spirit as
You are in body?
Would you not love the general weal improved?
Would you not love your towns made beautiful?
Your halls and courts
Reclaimed from dicers’ oaths?
Your laws made just and tuned to god-like laws?
Your weights and measures made invariable?
Is there no tonic in such hopes as these
To rouse you, giant?