Within a lifetime you have gained
Some seven million souls.
The land of Luther sends a swarming host;
And Milton’s land adventurous sons;
And Scandinavia’s realm,
And Michael Angelo’s mountains,
All Europe pours her wealth
Of brawn and spirit on you,
Until you are an empire
Of restless vital men, and teeming towns.
Before you were grown rich,
And populous
You brightened history;
Great men came from you.
But now that you have cities and great treasure
Where are your great ones?
What is your genius?
What star enwraps your eyes?
What heights allure you?
Hermaphroditic giant, sad and drunk
Not gay, but foolish, stuffed with new baked bread,
Who took away your gland pituitary,
Abandoned you to such exaggerate growth
Without increase of soul?
You blasphemous, yet afraid,
Licentious, yet ashamed,
Swaggering, yet blubbering
And boasting of your rights.
Materialist who woos the spiritual,
Who holds aloft the cross from which you’ve sold
The nails to junk-men.
And makes a hackle from the crown of thorns
Wherewith to hackle hemp to make a rope
For your own hanging in the Philippines!
Who with one hand grabs off the widow’s mite,
And with the other tosses golden coins
Into the beggar’s cup.
The black-snake whip in one hand, in the other
A plentiful supply of surgeon’s tape. Oh you!
A hard oppressor, charitably inclined,
And keen to see and take the outward image—
Devoid of categories to reduce
Its truth and meaning.
No seed of old world thistles should be sown here,
Or let to fly upon this soil.
Yet dogma has been sown here
Men rise thereby who sow the seed again;
Accessory spirits keep the ground well stirred.
It’s gold and then it’s power, but gold at last.
And for the rest what are your dominant breeds?
Smug cultures where the aggregate mind is leather
Gorged with the oil respectability
Impervious to thought.
These pick the eunuch type as being safe,
American, it’s called:
Sleek, quiet, smiling, ready servitors
Who for the salary, and that alone,
(Require no bribes)
Effect the business will.
You are a hollow thing of steel, a cauldron,
No monument of freedom.
You’re lettered, it is true,
With many luminous truths that came to be
Through deeds of men who died for liberty.
But inside you there is a seething compost
Of public schools, the ballot, journalism,
Laws, jurisprudence, dogma, gold the chief
Ingredient all stirred into a brew
Wherewith to feed yourself and keep yourself
The thing you are!
Not wholly slave, not really free,
Desiring vaguely to be master moral,
And yet too sicklied over by old truths,
The ballot, fear, plebian spirit, lack of mind,
To reach patrician levels—
Hermaphroditic giant, misty-eyed,
Half blinded by ideals, half by greed!
Can nothing but a war,
The prospect of a slaughter or the prize
Of foreign lands, shake off your lethargy,
And make you seem as big in spirit as
You are in body?
Would you not love the general weal improved?
Would you not love your towns made beautiful?
Your halls and courts
Reclaimed from dicers’ oaths?
Your laws made just and tuned to god-like laws?
Your weights and measures made invariable?
Is there no tonic in such hopes as these
To rouse you, giant?
I think you are Delilah
Tricked out as Liberty for a fancy ball,
Spiritless, provincal, shabby, dull,
Where no ways gentle, no natural mirth prevails.
You’ve put your Samson’s eye out; he would see.
You’ve chained him to the grinder, he would play,
Be wise and human, free, courageous, fair,
Of cleaner flesh and nobler spirit. Look
He may pull down your bastard temple yet,
And make you use pentelic marble for
Rebuilding of the Parthenon you planned,
And leave the misse stone thrown in a heap
For sheep gates in the walls of Ancient Zion!
THE MUNICIPAL PIER
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!