The Great Valley

Great snail whose lofty horns are knobbed with gold;
Long javelin of red-wood lying straight
Upon the changing indigos which unfold
In blues and chrysophrases from the gate
Of this our city sea-ward, till the gull
Becomes a gnat where lights annihilate
The wings’ last beat! Or are you like a hull
Pompeiian red upon the Nile’s slate green?
Or are you like these clouds which fanciful
Half open eyes make giant fish serene,
And motionless as rifts of carbuncles
Sunk in a waste of faience sky, between
Such terrifying turquoise? Darkness dulls
The torches of your towers struck to flame
By sun-set, and you mass amid the hulls
Of shadows on the water, then reclaim
This blackness with a thousand eyes of light!
Peiræus made with hands, which over-came
The waters, where no point of land gave might
To walls and slips, no Peiraic promontory
Inspired our Hippodamus in his flight
Sea-ward with docks, parades, an auditory
For music and a dancing floor for youths,
But only the sea tempted. Telling the story
That grows within the loop, its dens and booths,
And palaces of trade, is to omit
The city’s lofty genius and the truths
Through which she works at best, against the wit
Of creatures who would sell her body, take
The money of the sale as perquisite
For grossness in luxurious life. Awake
Themistocles of us and carve the dream
Of Burnham into stone! Along this lake
Such as no city looks on, to redeem
Its shores from shrieks and crashes, refuse, smoke
His architectural vision sketched the scheme
Of harbors, islands, boulevards—he spoke
For these, the concourse, stadium and a tomb
For that dull infamy of filth whose cloak
Is law, hiding the greedy hands that doom
To long delay with bribery. He is gone
These several years into the narrow room
Where beauty is no more of walk or lawn,
Or arch or peristyle, but still he says:
“Work quickly into form what I have drawn,
And give Chicago of these middle days
The glory which it merits: To this Pier
Make wide the marble way, build new the quays
Give to the swimmers depths made fresh and clear,
Lay out the flowering gardens, founts and pools
Such as Versailles knows. The river steer
Under the arches of two decked bascules.”
Look at the photographs of seventy-six,
Whoever you are who mocks or ridicules
This city, then imagine stones and bricks
Which from such lowness rose, in fifty years
By so much grown miraculous to transfix
The future’s wonder as ours is for piers
Like this, Chicago! O ye men who wield
Small strength or great or none, too apt at sneers
For men who did too little, you must yield
Your names for judgment soon, have you done more
To make this city great than Marshall Field?
While you were railing, idling, on this shore
Hands silent, out of sight were plunged in toil.
You woke one morning to the waters’ roar
And saw these gilded turrets flash and spoil
The sun-light of the spring. What have you sown
Of truth or beauty in this eager soil
To make your living felt, your labor known?
Sometimes I see silk banners in the sky,
And hear the sound of silver trumpets blown,
And bells high turreted. And passing by
This firmament of rolling blue great throngs
Stream in an air of brilliant sun where I
A century gone am of it, when my songs
Are but a record of a day that died,
And saw the end of desecrating wrongs.
How sweet bells are borne on the evening tide
High up where heaven is flushed and the moon’s sphere
Looks down on temples, arches, where the wide
Eternal waters thunder round the Pier!

GOBINEAU TO TREE

Since our talk at Christiana I have read
All you referred me to concerning Lincoln:
His speeches and the story of the struggle
Which ended in your war, not civil really
But waged between two nations—but no matter!
To me whose life is closing, and whose life
Was spent in struggle, much of misery,
In friendship with De Tocqueville then at odds
With him and his philosophy, who knew
Bismarck, who saw the wars of Europe, saw
Great men come up and fall, and systems change,
Who probed into the Renaissance and mastered
Religions and philosophies and wrote
Concerning racial inequalities—
To me I say this crisis of your time
And country seems remote as it might be
Almost in far Australia, trivial
In substance and effect, or world result.
And now your letter and these documents
Concerning Douglas yield but scanty gold.
Perhaps I’ve reached an age where I cannot
Digest new matter, or resolve its worth,
Extract its bearing and significance.
But since you ask me I am writing you
What I’ve arrived at.

From the photographs
And the descriptions of your Illinois,
Where Lincoln spent his youth, I almost sicken:
Small muddy rivers flanked by bottom lands
So fat of fertile stuff the grossest weeds
Thrive thriftier than in Egypt, round their roots
Repulsive serpents crawl, the air is full
Of loathsome insects, and along these banks
An agued people live who have no life
Except hard toil, whose pleasures are the dance
Where violent liquor takes the gun or knife;
Who have no inspiration save the orgy
Of the religious meeting, where the cult
Of savage dreams is almost theirs. The towns
Places of filth, of maddening quietude;
Streets mired with mud, board sidewalks where the men,
Like chickens with the cholera, stand and squeak
Foul or half-idiot things; near by the churches,
Mere arch-ways to the grave-yard. Nothing here
Of conscious plan to lift the spirit up.
All is defeat of liberty in spite
Of certain strong men, certain splendid breeds,
The pioneers who made your state; no beauty
Save as a soul delves in a master book.
And out of this your Lincoln came, not poor
As Burns was in a land of storied towers,
But poor as a degenerate breed is poor
Sunk down in squalor.

Yet he seems a man
Of master qualities. The muddy streets,
And melancholy of a pastoral town,
And sights of people sick, the stifling weeds
Which grew about him left his spirit clean,
Save for an ache that all his youth was spent
In such surroundings.

And observe the man!
Do poverty and life among such people
Make him a libertarian? Let us see.
At twenty years he is a centralist,
Stands for the bank which Andrew Jackson fought,
And lauds protection, thinks of Washington
Much more than Springfield. That is right I say—
But call him not a democrat.

Look here!
This master book of Stephens which you sent me
Accuses Lincoln of imperial deeds,
And breach of laws, and rightly so, in truth.
That makes me love him, but the end he sought
Is something else. At first that was the Union,
Straight through it was the Union, but at last
The strain of Christian softness always his
Which filled him full of hate for slavery
Cropped out in freedom for your negro slaves,
Which was an act of war, and so confessed,
Not propped by law, but only by a will.
Thus he became a man who broke all law
To have his law. He killed a million men
For what he called the Union, what he thought
Was truth of Christian brotherhood. I say
He killed a million men, for it is true
Your war had never come, had he believed
All government must rest in men’s consent.
What have we but a soul imperial?
A brother to me, standing for the strong,
For master races, blindly at the work
Of biologic mount? The cells of him
That make him saint for radicals and dreamers
Are but somatic, but the sperm of him
Will propagate great rulers.

See his face!
Its tragic pathos fools the idealist—
But study it. First, then, observe the eyes,
And tell me how within their gaze events
Or men could lose their true proportions! Here
No visions swarm, no dreams with flashing wings
Throw light upon them. No, they only look
Across a boundless prairie, that is all.
And in that brow and nose we see a strength
Slow, steady, wary, cautious—why this man
Is your conservative, perhaps your best,
Which is one reason why he loved the Union,
And even said at last that government
Of the people meant the Union—how absurd!—
Would perish, if it perished, clearly false!
And if ’twere true would be the better. Read
My Renaissance, and other books, you’ll see
How I’d protect the master spirits, keep
The master races pure; how I detest
The brotherhood of man, how I have shown
The falseness of these Galilean dreams,
These syrups strained in secret, used to drug
The strong and make them equal with the weak.
Such things are of the mind which weaves in space,—
A penalty of thought. Come back to earth,
Live close to nature. Do not sap a rose
To nourish cabbages, and call it truth!

Well, then, your negro’s freed! But what of that?
You do not want him for a friend or spouse.
I would not see him whipped, or made a bond.
But tell me what you’re thinking of who say
His freedom is a gain for liberty?
To buy men’s labor is to buy their bodies.
Your country now has entered on a course
Of buying labor, wait and see what comes!
I see processions filing through your land.
They carry banners bearing Lincoln’s face.
And there are hordes who think the kingdom’s coming:
As Lincoln freed the slaves, one will arise
To free all men! The signs before the war
Are come again, portentous stars appear
Which prophesied the war! All revolutions
Are so announced, the world is rising higher
Through ordered revolutions, preordained!
Well, certain men look at these mad processions
From well-protected windows, with a smile—
They are your millionaires, they think they know
The soul of Lincoln better than the crowds
That carry banners with his picture on them.
Yes, all they have they owe to Lincoln, they
Grew strong through Lincoln.

But are you content
To have your negroes free, and millionaires
In mastership of your republic? Where
Are men to overlord your millionaires? You know
Out of the eater comes forth meat, who will
Exhaust the strength of those whose strength was gained
From blood of boys shed on the battle field?
What can you do to have a Renaissance
That with a terrible light will drive to covert
Owls, bats, and mousing hawks, that neither know
What life is, whence they come, nor what they are,
Who live by superstition, codes of slaves,
Fear truth, are weak, and only hunger know—
You must have such a Renaissance or die
While slipping smugly, self sufficiently
Along a way unvisioned, while you play
The hypocrite as it was never played
In any place, in any time on earth!
These things I see. But let me in conclusion
Point to your Lincoln as a man who makes
For power and beauty in your country, call it
Republic if you will, the name is nothing.
I say the vitalest force is love, not hate.
I say that all great souls are lovers, but of what?
Why, what great Goethe loved! Your master men
Should learn of Goethe, hold the crowd through him.
And Lincoln was a lover, but of what?
Well not the cesspool of the black man’s slavery.
He loved the mathematics of high truths,
And heightened spirituality, that’s the reason
Only a man like me can know him, that’s
The reason that your crude American thought
Misses the man.

OLD PIERY

I had a paying little refinery
And all was well with me, and then
The Trust edged up to me and wiped me out.
So much for northern tariff, freedom
Of niggers and New England rule.
Praise God for sponging slavery from the Slate!
Well, then I was without a cent again,
What should I do? I wanted first a change,
And rest in the use of other faculties,
So I went out and took a farm.
One thing leads to another. I wake up one morning
And find a man from Illinois
Become my neighbor on the adjoining farm.
It’s your John Cogdall, once of Petersburg,
County of Menard, in Illinois,
Precinct Indian Point, he said to me.
We’re friends at once, and visit back and forth.
Two months ago I saw upon his table
A copy of the Petersburg Observer—
John likes to hear the home-town news—
I pick it up and scan it through to see
What a country paper is in Illinois.
And there I read this notice of “Old Piery,”
Real name Cordelia Stacke, dead thirty years,
Whose money in the county treasury
Is to be made escheat. So here I am
Maneuvering for this money, rather shabby
If I was not so devilish poor and pressed;
If letting Menard County have the prize
Would profit any one, when I can prove
Old Piery was my great aunt,
Her father and my grandfather brothers,
When I can prove that I’m her only heir.

Yes, but not as pure of blood.
Her father was a judge in South Carolina,
Her mother was a belle of New Orleans,
My father told me so. Cordelia Stacke,
“Old Piery,” as you called her, was a story
We heard as children sitting on his knee.
I know to prove my name is Stacke,
And then because her name was Stacke
Won’t draw this money from your treasury,
But wait
Go to your vault and get that ring she wore,
Slipped from her dead hand when you found her body
Dead for a week amid her rags and stuff.
Go get that ring, Mr. Treasurer of Menard,
If I don’t describe it
Down to the finest point,
Just as I heard my father say
The night she disappeared she wore a ring
Of such and such, I’ll go back to my farm
In Mississippi. But I’ll do much more
I’ll trace her from Columbia to Old Salem;
I’ll show her crazed brain luring her along
To find the spot where Lincoln kept the store
Two miles from where we sit.
She must have walked
Across Virginia, West Virginia,
Ohio, Indiana, or perhaps
She footed it through Tennessee, Kentucky.

I talked this morning with your county judge.
He said she came here late in ’65
Or early ’66,
Was seen by farmers near the Salem Mill,
A loitering, mumbling woman,
Not old, but looking old, and aging fast
As she became a figure in your streets
And alleys with a gunny-sack on back,
Wherein she stuffed old bottles, paper, things
She picked industriously and stored away.
Would buy a bit of cold food at the baker’s.
Sometimes would sit on door steps eating cake,
Which friendly hands had given her, then depart
And say, “God rest your souls!” Attended mass
On Sunday mornings, knew no one
And had no friends.
In ’69 was found incompetent,
And placed in charge of a conservator.
Then as she was not dangerous went ahead
At picking rags,
Until in ’97 passed away.

Such was the life and death of a fine girl,
The daughter of a judge in South Carolina
And a belle of New Orleans.
And after life at best knew life at worst,
Beginning in a southern capitol
Where she knew riches, admiration, place,
She ended up in Petersburg, Illinois,
A little croaking, mad but harmless waif,
A withered leaf stirred by the Lincoln storm.
And here’s my guess:
The fancy of her madness brought her here
To see the country where
The man who was a laborer, kept a store,
Could rise therefrom,
And bring such desolation to the South,
Such sorrow to herself, that is my guess.

The name’s Cordelia Stacke inside this ring
You tell me. She’s the same no doubt.
We all lived in Columbia when the troops
Of Sherman whirled upon us to the sea.
I was a year old then. We were burned out,
Lost everything.
The troops came howling, plundering,
And tossing combustible chemicals.
They butchered just for sport our cattle;
Split chests and cabinets with savage axes;
Walked with their hob-nailed boots on our pianos;
Ran bayonets through pictures;
Rode horses in our parlors;
Broke open trunks and safes;
Searched cellars, opened graves for hoarded gold,
And yelled “You dirty rebels now we’ve got you.”
They filled their bellies up with wine and whisky,
And drunken, howling through Columbia’s streets
They carried vases, goblets, silver, gold,
And rolled about with pockets full of loot,
And then at last they stuck the torch to us
And made a bon-fire of our city.

Cordelia had a lover who was killed
At Antietam fighting, not for niggers,
But fighting back the fools who had been crazed
By preachers, poets, Garrisons and Whittiers
Who thought they worked for freedom, but instead
Worked for New England’s tariff—look at me
How could the trust destroy me if the tariff
Put no bricks in the bully’s boxing gloves?
Well, then, Cordelia lost her lover,
And when the troops came was a novitiate
Nun at the convent. And the soldiers came
To say the convent would be spared. But when
The flames arose, she ran into the city
To be beside her father and her mother.
And she arrived
Just as the soldiers entered the house for loot.
Her mother was in bed half dead from fright,
Not well at best.
The soldiers broke the bedroom door,
And howled for treasure. When the mother said
There was no treasure, then they took her
And flung her from the bed, ripped up the matress,
Raked pictures from the walls, and smashed the mirrors,
Tore closets open, then went to the cellar
Leaving the mother lying on the floor,
Who lay as dead.
They drank what wine they found,
Then seized the father, hung him to a tree
To make him tell where he kept money hidden.
The mother died in two days from the fright.
The father was not killed, they took him down,
And went their way carousing, yelling out
“You dirty rebels now we’ve got you fair.”
Cordelia thought no doubt that both were dead.
A passerby beheld her on the lawn
Her hair let down and plucking at her dress.
But who could stop to help her in that hell
Of a city burning and the howls and shouts,
And falling walls?
Cordelia disappeared and from that night
Was never seen or heard of. To his death
Her father thought she met a terrible fate:
Was raped and slaughtered.

So you see
All of this put together tells the story
Of this poor creature whom you called “Old Piery.”
But let me add Cordelia had a horse
She called “Old Piery”—that fits in my proof.
That’s why she named herself “Old Piery” here,
And gave your boys and girls a mocking name
To hail her with as she went up your alleys;
With which to rap the windows of her room,
Where bottles, cans, waste rags, and copper things,
Old hoops of iron, staves, old boots and shoes,
Springs, wheels of clocks, and locks of broken guns,
Old boards and boxes, stacks of paper waste
Stuffed up the place, and where unknown to all
Paper and silver money hid in cracks
Between the leaves of fouled and rain-soaked books,
Or packed in jars were kept by her. You see
Her mind was turned to treasure, hiding it
Against the soldiers maybe, in this land
Where Lincoln was a laborer, farmer, kept
A store at Salem.

Well I say
God rest her soul, as she was used to say.
I want to raise a stone to mark her grave,
And carve her name below a broken heart.
For listen now: the ring Cordelia wore
Was just a little band of gold and set
With a cornelian heart—am I not right?
I knew I was.

THE TYPICAL AMERICAN?

He calls himself an American citizen—
And yet among such various breeds of men
Who’ll call him typical? At any rate
His faults or virtues one may predicate
Somewhat as follows: He is sent to school
Little or much, where he imbibes the rule
Of safety first and comfort; in his youth
He joins the church and ends the quest of truth.
Beyond the pages of theology
He does not turn, he does not seem to see
How hunger makes these Occidental creeds
Sweet foliage on which the stomach feeds.
Like those thick tussock moths upon the bole
Of a great beech tree, feed the human soul
And it will use the food for gold and power!
So men have used Christ Jesus’ tender flower,
And garnered it for porridge, opiates,
And made it flesh of customs laws and states
Where life repeats itself after a plan
And breeds the typical American—
As he regards himself.

Our man matures
And enters business, following the lures
Of great increase in business, more receipts—
Upon this object center all his wits.
And greater crops make needful larger barns,
Vainly the parable of Jesus warns.
His soul is now required, is taken away
From living waters, in a little day
Thrift, labor dooms him, leaves him banqueting
Where nothing nourishes, they are the sting
Which deadens him and casts him down at last
Fly blown or numb or lifeless in this vast
Surrounding air of Vital Power, where God
Like the great sun, invites the wayside clod
To live at full.

In time our hero weds
A woman like himself, and little heads
Soon run about a house or pleasant yard.
He must work now to keep them—have regard
To the community, its thoughts and ways.
What church is here? He finds it best to praise
Its pastor and its flock, his children send
To Sunday school, if never he attend
Its services. What politics obtain?
He must support the tussock leaf campaigns
If he would eat himself. ’Tis best to join
The party which controls the greater coin.
And so what is his party’s interest
In business? There must his soul invest
Its treasure till the two are wholly one.
Like the poor prostitute he is undone
In virtue not alone, but he has made
Himself a cog-wheel in the filthy trade
Of justice courts, police and graft in wine
Bondsmen and lawyers with a strength malign
Moving the silken vestured marionette
To laugh, entice and play the sad coquette.
Yet if for bread you are compelled to ask
The giver may impose an evil task,
Or terms of life. Would you retain a roof,
Mix with the crowd, nor dare to stand aloof.
Our hero sees this, wears a hopeful smile
To cover up his spattered soul, and while
Digesting wounded truth, hiding his thought,
His own opinions, for his soul is caught
Amid the idiot hands that strike and press—
One may glide through who learns to say yes, yes,
While in heart-sickness whispering to himself:
I do this for the children, and for pelf
To keep the house and yard, the cupboard full.
Some time I hope to free myself and pull
My legs out of this social muck and mire.
First money is, then freedom his desire,
But often neither comes. If he win wealth
He has become lead-poisoned, for by stealth
The virus of the colors which he used
To paint his life is spread and interfused
In every vein. By ways complaisant
Our hero has got gold from ignorant
Vulgarian nondescripts, has entertained
The odorous cormorants, and has profaned
His household gods to keep them safe and whole
Upon the altar—winning what a goal!
For meantime in this living he has schooled
His children in the precepts which have ruled
His days from the beginning. They are bred
His out-look to repeat, and even to tread
The way he went amid the tangled wood
In their own time and chosen neighborhood.
What has our hero done? Why nothing more
Than feed upon the beech leaves, gather store
For children moths to feed on, and get strength
To climb the branches and on leaves at length
To feed of their own will.

Is this a man?
Is this your typical American?

COME, REPUBLIC

Come! United States of America,
And you one hundred million souls, O Republic,
Throw out your chests, lift up your heads,
And walk with a soldier’s stride.
Quit burning up for money alone.
Quit slouching and dawdling,
And dreaming and moralising.
Quit idling about the streets, like the boy
In the village, who pines for the city.
Root out the sinister secret societies,
And the clans that stick together for office,
And the good men who care nothing for liberty,
But would run you, O Republic, as a household is run.
It is time, Republic, to get some class,
It is time to harden your muscles,
And to clear your eyes in the cold water of Reality,
And to tighten your nerves.
It is time to think what Nature means,
And to consult Nature,
When your soul, as you call it, calls to you
To follow principle!
It is time to snuff out the A. D. Bloods.
It is time to lift yourself, O Republic,
From the street corners of Spoon River.

Do you wish to survive,
And to count in the years to come?
Then do what the plow-boys did in sixty-one,
Who left the fields for the camp,
And tightened their nerves and hardened their arms
Till the day they left the camp for the fields
The bravest, readiest, clearest-eyed
Straight-walking men in the world,
And symbolical of a Republic
That is worthy the name!

If you, Republic, had kept the faith
Of a culture all your own,
And a spiritual independence,
And a freedom large and new.
If you had not set up a Federal judge in China,
And scrambled for place in the Orient,
And stolen the Philippine Islands,
And mixed in the business of Europe,
Three thousand miles of water east,
And seven thousand west
Had kept your hands untainted, free
For a culture all your own!
But while you were fumbling, and while you were dreaming
As the boy in the village dreams of the city
You were doing something worse:
You were imitating!
You came to the city and aped the swells,
And tried to enter their set!
You strained your Fate to their fate,
And borrowed the mood to live their life!
And here you are in the game, Republic,
But not prepared to play!

But you did it.
And the water east and water west
Are no longer your safeguard:
They are now your danger and difficulty!
And you must live the life you started to imitate
In spite of these perilous waters.
For they keep you now from being neutral—
For you are not neutral, Republic,
You only pretend to be.
You are not free, independent, brave,
You are shackled, cowardly
For what could happen to you overnight
In the Orient,
If you stood with your shoulders up,
And were Neutral!

Suppose you do it, Republic.
Get some class,
Throw out your chest, lift up your head,
Be a ruler in the world,
And not a hermit in regimentals with a flint-lock.
Colossus with one foot in Europe,
And one in China,
Quit looking between your legs for the re-appearance
Of the star of Bethlehem—
Stand up and be a man!