WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language cover

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

Chapter 27: THE SEA SERPENT CHANTEY
By Vachel Lindsay
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

American LiteraturePoetry

About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical and narrative poems that range from long, scene-setting pieces celebrating California's landscapes and the new art of the moving picture to playful rhymed scenarios and verse games. It interleaves meditations on history, myth, science, and religion with comic sketches and dialectal songs, moves into wartime reflections and elegies for fallen poets, and closes with local, Midwestern vignettes and personal tributes. The poet shifts between high-lyric description, satirical invective, and vernacular rhythms, experimenting with form and voice to present an uneven but energetic portrait of American life, technology, and regional identity in early twentieth-century verse.

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.
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.