ONE END OF LOVE
“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).
THE EAGLE THAT IS FORGOTTEN[[34]]
[John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847; died March 12, 1902]
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone,
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
“We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.
They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day,
Now you were ended. They praised you, ... and laid you away.
The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,
The widow bereft of her pittance, the boy without youth,
The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor
That should have remembered forever, ... remember no more.
Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call
The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,
A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons,
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.
Sleep softly, ... eagle forgotten, ... under the stone,
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
Sleep on, O brave hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame—
To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,
To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.
THE CONGO[[35]]
(A Study of the Negro Race)
I. Their Basic Savagery
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, |A deep rolling bass.|
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, Boom,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.
Then I had religion, Then I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, |More deliberate. Solemnly chanted.|
Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong. |A rapidly piling climax of speed and racket.|
And “Blood” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
“Blood” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,
“Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing!
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom,”
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune |With a philosophic pause.|
From the mouth of the Congo
To the Mountains of the Moon.
Death is an Elephant,
Torch-eyed and horrible, |Shrilly and with a heavily accented meter.|
Foam-flanked and terrible.
Boom, steal the pygmies,
Boom, kill the Arabs,
Boom, kill the white men,
Hoo, Hoo, Hoo. |Like the wind in the chimney.|
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell.
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
Listen to the creepy proclamation,
Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation,
Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay,
Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play:—
“Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, |All the o sounds very golden. Heavy accents very heavy. Light accents very light. Last line whispered.|
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.”
II. Their Irrepressible High Spirits
Wild crap-shooters with a whoop and a call |Rather shill and high.|
Danced the juba in their gambling-hall
And laughed fit to kill, and shook the town,
And guyed the policemen and laughed them down
With a boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom....
Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, |Read exactly as in first section.|
Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.
A negro fairyland swung into view, |Lay emphasis on the delicate ideas. Keep as light-footed as possible.|
A minstrel river
Where dreams come true.
The ebony palace soared on high
Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky.
The inlaid porches and casements shone
With gold and ivory and elephant-bone.
And the black crowd laughed till their sides were sore
At the baboon butler in the agate door,
And the well-known tunes of the parrot band
That trilled on the bushes of that magic-land.
A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came |With pomposity.|
Through the agate doorway in suits of flame,
Yea, long-tailed coats with a gold-leaf crust
And hats that were covered with diamond-dust.
And the crowd in the court gave a whoop and a call
And danced the juba from wall to wall.
But the witch-men suddenly stilled the throng
With a stern cold glare, and a stern old song:— |With a great deliberation and ghostliness.|
“Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” ...
Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes,
Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, |With overwhelming assurance, good cheer, and pomp.|
Shoes with a patent leather shine,
And tall silk hats that were red as wine.
And they pranced with their butterfly partners there,
Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair, |With growing speed and sharply marked dance-rhythm.|
Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet,
And bells on their ankles and little black feet.
And the couples railed at the chant and the frown
Of the witch-men lean, and laughed them down.
(O rare was the revel, and well worth while
That made those glowering witch-men smile.)
The cake-walk royalty then began
To walk for a cake that was tall as a man
To the tune of “Boomlay, boomlay, Boom,”
While the witch-men laughed, with a sinister air,
And sang with the scalawags prancing there:— |With a touch of negro dialect, and as rapidly as possible toward the end.|
“Walk with care, walk with care,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.
Beware, beware, walk with care,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay,
Boom.”
Oh rare was the revel, and well worth while |Slow philosophic calm.|
That made those glowering witch-men smile.
III. The Hope of their Religion
A good old negro in the slums of the town |Heavy bass. With a literal imitation of camp-meeting racket, and trance.|
Preached at a sister for her velvet gown.
Howled at a brother for his low-down ways,
His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days.
Beat on the Bible till he wore it out,
Starting the jubilee revival shout.
And some had visions, as they stood on chairs,
And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs.
And they all repented, a thousand strong,
From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong
And slammed their hymn books till they shook the room
With “Glory, glory, glory,”
And “Boom, boom, Boom.”
Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, |Exactly as in the first section.|
Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.
And the gray sky opened like a new-rent veil
And showed the apostles with their coats of mail.
In bright white steel they were seated round
And their fire-eyes watched where the Congo wound.
And the twelve apostles, from their thrones on high,
Thrilled all the forest with their heavenly cry:—
“Mumbo-Jumbo will die in the jungle; |Sung to the tune of “Hark, ten thousand harps and voices.”|
Never again will he hoo-doo you,
Never again will he hoo-doo you.”
Then along that river, a thousand miles, |With growing deliberation and joy.|
The vine-snared trees fell down in files.
Pioneer angels cleared the way
For a Congo paradise, for babes at play,
For sacred capitals, for temples clean.
Gone were the skull-faced witch-men lean.
There, where the wild ghost-gods had wailed |In a rather high key—as delicately as possible.|
A million boats of the angels sailed
With oars of silver, and prows of blue
And silken pennants that the sun shone through.
’Twas a land transfigured, ’twas a new creation.
Oh, a singing wind swept the negro nation;
And on through the backwoods clearing flew:—
“Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle. |To the tune of “Hark, ten thousand harps and voices.”|
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.”
Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men,
And only the vulture dared again
By the far, lone mountains of the moon
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:—
“Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. |Dying off into a penetrating, terrified whisper.|
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo ... Jumbo ... will ... hoo-doo ... you.”