Round and round the mighty court-house square.
From this scene General Booth ascends into heaven. “The Congo” is a similar piece of interpretation. Few types could seem more hopeless than the levee negroes, yet through them Mr. Lindsay makes a study of their race. In a drunken saloon crowd he sees the basic savagery which back in the Congo forests displays itself in picturesque poetry stuff. In a group of crapshooters who laugh down a police raid he finds the irrepressible high spirits which carry the negroes in imagination back to a regal Congo cakewalk, and in the exhortations of an African evangelist he sees the same hope of religion which the slave brought with him from his native soil. Once again, “The Chinese Nightingale” is written in the same spirit, this time accounting for the Chinese laundry-man’s tireless industry through the fact that while his iron pounds in the dead of night he is living in a world of oriental romance.
Mr. Lindsay’s poetry has two chief aspects, sometimes separated, sometimes compounded. One of these is an ethical seriousness. He might be called an ideally provincial character. He chooses to express himself in terms of his home and neighborhood, but his interests move out through a series of concentric circles which include his city, his state, America, and the world federation. The poems on Springfield, therefore, are of a piece with the poems on “America Watching the War” and those on “America at War.” “The Soul of the City,” with Mr. Lindsay’s own drawings, is quite as interesting as any of the poems above mentioned. “Springfield Magical” suggests the source of his inspiration:
In this, the City of my Discontent,
Sometimes there comes a whisper from the grass,
“Romance, Romance—is here. No Hindu town
Is quite so strange. No Citadel of Brass
By Sinbad found, held half such love and hate;
No picture-palace in a picture-book
Such webs of Friendship, Beauty, Greed and Fate!”