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.