The Great Valley

by Edgar Lee Masters

And Greenberry Atterberry, who toed it like a pigeon
Has gone and got religion;
He’s deserted the dancers, the fiddlers, merry-makers,
And I should do it too.
For Charley, Charley has left me for to roam.
But a woman at the mourner’s bench must tell her story true—
What shall I do? What shall I do?

My grandmother told me of Old Peter Cartwright
Who preached hell-fire
And the worm that never dies.
And here’s a young preacher at the New Hope Meeting house,
And every one allows, he has old Peter’s brows,
And flaming of the eyes,
And the very same way, they say.
Last night he stuck his finger right down in my direction,
And said: “God doesn’t care
For your woman’s hair.
Jesus wants to know if your soul is fair
As your woman’s complexion.”
And then I thought he knew—
O what shall I do?

Greenberry Atterberry, weeping and unsteady
Had left his seat already.
He stood at the mourner’s bench in great tribulation
And told the congregation:
That fiddling and dancing and tobacco chewin’
Led up to whisky and to woman’s ruin—
And I thought he looked at me.
Well, you can stop dancing, and you can stop drinking
And you can leave the quarter-horses at the crooked races.
But a woman, a woman, the people will be thinking
Forever of a woman who confesses her behavior.
And then I couldn’t look in the people’s faces,
All weeping and singing, O gentle Saviour!
Then the devil said: You wench
You’d cut a pretty figure at the mourner’s bench,
Go out and look for Charley,
Go out and look for Charley,
He’s down at Leese’s Grove.
He has found a fresh love
Go win him back again.
He is dancing on the platform to the Speckled Hen.

O Saviour, Saviour, how can I join the mourners,
Face all the scorners?
But how can I hunt Charley at Leese’s Grove?
How can I stand the staring, the whispering of things
Down at Revis Springs?
How can I stand the mocking of the fiddle strings?
Charley! Charley!
So it’s knowing what’s best to do,
Saviour! Saviour!
Its knowing what’s best to do!

THE BAY-WINDOW

She sat at a bay-window where she saw
First open carriages and buggies pass!
And then Victorias with horses docked
And bits and buckles, chains of shining brass.
And then the horseless carriage, till at last
The swallow-gleam of varnished limousines
Silent as shadows took her lifted eye,
Uplifted from a book. She always sat
In her bay-window with a book,
And with a tinted fan in summer-time.

But first she was a bride
Before the war.
Springing from honest blood, her place
Passed over lightly as her grandeur grew:
She was of seed too vital to decay
Wholly in any soil, the sort that grows and blooms
Where never gardener comes.
And this bay-window! An aging man of gold
Had plucked her up, and here she rests and breathes
The free air of Chicago’s reclamation.
And then she is
A wonder-bride for her brown hair,
And gray-blue eyes, and laughter, sunny wit,
And naturally patrician ways and speech,
(Acquiring French now that the chance has come),
And she is eighteen and is born to rule.

And her great merchant husband with blue eyes,
And strong beaked English nose,
Walks straighter for a pride that she is his.
Gives her a country place spaced out in walks,
And flower beds, where now such flimsy flats
Confront Grand Boulevard!
And for a city house he builds a house
Three stories high at Twentieth street,
Where then the manifest was sand and oaks,
And what is now the Loop, was just as far
As Hyde Park from the Loop is now.

In this bay-window then she sits a bride,
And sees the scrub oak cut and mansions fill
Gradually year by year the waste of sand.
For fashion follows her and builds beside her,
Till Prairie Avenue becomes the street
Of millionaires, who hear from traveled wives
What London is, what Paris is,
And open purses to unfolding tastes
For canvases and sculpture.
For every one grows rich now in Chicago.
And in the seventies women go to Paris,
Herself among the first, at least the chief,
See Egypt and see Rome.
And when returned drive down where wondering eyes
Along the marble terrace promenading,
Where Michigan Avenue was bounded by
The Lake across the street,
Behold the striped silk of their parasols
Fluttering over plumes and dancing eyes,
And purple velvet of Victorias.

For now it is the classic age!
There is the driving park,
There is the Palmer House,
There are cathedrals too.
There are the lofty ceilings walnut trimmed,
And foliate chandeliers of polished brass,
And marble-slabbed buffets with heavy cupids,
And clustered fruits carved in their sombre wood,
And square pianos with their rosewood legs
Swelled out with oval figures like great plums.
And paintings deeply daubed in brown asphaltum
Where chiaroscuro ends were lost in shadows,
Not lost in light, depressionistic things,
From which her lambent intuition led her.
She was among the first to catch the psychic
Waves that sweep around this little world
And change all things.
She traveled much and lived in Europe much,
Returning to her window where she watched
The city pass and bow its admiration,
The half of whom she knew as time went on,
Though all knew her and said “there is the queen,”
Or “there she is who thinks she is the queen.”