Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!
A RHYME IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
(The campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six, as viewed by a sixteen-year-old)
I
In a nation of one hundred fine mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting millions
There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about,
And knock your old blue devils out.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American poet who could sing outdoors.
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendour,
Wild roses from the plains that made hearts tender,
All the funny circus silks
Of politics unfurled,
Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle;
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle;
There were real lines drawn:
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.
It was Eighteen Ninety-six, and I was just sixteen,
And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
When there came from the sunset Nebraska's shout of joy:
In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat,
He scourged the elephant plutocrats
With barbed wire from the Platte.
The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.
They saw that summer's noon
A tribe of wonders coming
To a marching tune.
Oh, the long horns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
From all the new-born States arow,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,
The hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah—sharp was their song!
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The long-horn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the cañons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a-howling through the air.