“It is long since we met,” she said.
I answered, “Yes.”
She is not fair,
But very old now, and no gold
Gleams in that scant gray withered hair
Where once much gold was: and, I think,
Not easily might one bring tears
Into her eyes, which have become
Like dusty glass.
“’Tis thirty years,”
I said. “And then the war came on
Apace, and our young King had need
Of men to serve him oversea
Against the heathen. For their greed,
Puffed up at Tunis, troubles him——”
She said: “This week my son is gone
To him at Paris with his men.”
And then: “You never married, John?”
I answered, “No.” And so we sate
Musing a while.
Then with his guests
Came Robert; and his thin voice broke
Upon my dream, with the old jests,
No food for laughter now: and swore
We must be friends now that our feud
Was overpast.
“We are grown old—
Eh, John?” he said. “And, by the Rood!
’Tis time we were at peace with God
Who are not long for this world.”
“Yea,”
I answered; “we are old.” And then,
Remembering that April day
At Calais, and that hawthorn field
Wherein we fought long since, I said:
“We are friends now.”
And she sate by,
Scarce heeding. Thus the evening sped.
And we ride homeward now, and I
Ride moodily; my palfrey jogs
Along a rock-strewn way the moon
Lights up for us; yonder the bogs
Are curdled with thin ice; the trees
Are naked; from the barren wold
The wind comes like a blade aslant
Across a world grown very old.
_Vachel Lindsay_
(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he still lives
in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home is next door
to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; from the window
where Lindsay does most of his writing, he saw many Governors come
and go, including the martyred John P. Altgeld, whom he has
celebrated in one of his finest poems. He graduated from the
Springfield High School, attended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied
at the Art Institute at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School
of Art (1904). After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he
took the first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia
and the Carolinas, preaching “the gospel of beauty,” and formulating
his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) During the
following five years, Lindsay made several of these trips,
travelling as a combination missionary and minstrel. Like a true
revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he met, a response to
beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited and chanted for his
supper, distributing a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded
for Bread.”
Lindsay began to create more poetry to reach the public—all of his
verse being written in his rôle of apostle. He was, primarily, a
rhyming John the Baptist singing to convert the heathen, to
stimulate and encourage the half-hearted dreams that hide and are
lost in our sordid villages and townships. But the great audiences
he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though his
collection _General Booth Enters Into Heaven_ (1913) struck many a
loud and racy note.
Lindsay broadened his effects, developed the chant and, the
following year, published his _The Congo and Other Poems_ (1914), an
infectious blend of rhymes, ragtime and religion. In the title-poem
and, in a lesser degree, the three companion chants, Lindsay struck
his most powerful—and most popular—vein. They gave people
(particularly when intoned aloud) that primitive joy in syncopated
sound that is at the very base of song. In these experiments in
breaking down the barriers between poetry and music, Lindsay
(obviously infected by the echolalia of Poe’s “Bells”) tried to
create what he called a “Higher Vaudeville” imagination, carrying
the form back to the old Greek precedent where every line was
half-spoken, half-sung.
Lindsay’s innovation succeeded at once. The novelty, the speed, the
clatter forced the attention of people who had never paid the
slightest heed to the poet’s quieter verses. Men heard the _sounds_
of energetic America in these lines even when they were deaf to its
spirit. They failed to see that, beneath the noise of “The Kallyope
Yell” and “The Sante Fé Trail,” Lindsay was partly an admirer,
partly an ironical critic of the shrieking energy of these states.
By his effort to win the enemy over, Lindsay had persuaded the
proverbially tired business man to listen at last. But, in
overstressing the vaudeville features, there arose the danger of
Lindsay the poet being lost in Lindsay the entertainer. The
sympathetic and colorful studies of negro spirits and psychology
(seen at their best in “The Congo,” “John Brown” and “Simon Legree”)
degenerated into the crude buffooneries of “The Daniel Jazz” and
“The Blacksmith’s Serenade.”
But Lindsay’s earnestness, keyed up by an exuberant fancy, saved
him. _The Chinese Nightingale_ (1917) begins with one of the most
whimsical pieces Lindsay has ever devised. And if the subsequent
_The Golden Whales of California_ (1920) is less distinctive, it is
principally because the author has written too much and too speedily
to be self-critical. It is his peculiar appraisal of loveliness, the
rollicking high spirits joined to a stubborn evangelism, that makes
Lindsay so representative a product of his environment.
Besides his original poetry, Lindsay has embodied his experiences
and meditations on the road in two prose volumes, _A Handy Guide for
Beggars_ (1916) and _Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of
Beauty_ (1914), as well as a prophetic study of the “silent drama,”
_The Art of the Moving Picture_ (1915).