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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 57: WHEN THE MISSISSIPPI FLOWED IN INDIANA
By Vachel Lindsay
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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.

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.