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

Chapter 46: THE FEVER CALLED WAR

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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 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.”