THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

AND OTHER RHYMES IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

LIST OF THE BOOKS OF VACHEL LINDSAY

Prose:

A Handy Guide for Beggars

Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty

The Art of the Moving Picture

Verse:

General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems

The Congo and Other Poems

The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems

The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language

It is suggested that those who are interested in a complete view of these works should take them in the above order. They are all published by The Macmillan Company.

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

AND OTHER RHYMES IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

BY
VACHEL LINDSAY

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1920,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1920.

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
TO
ISADORA BENNETT,
CITIZEN OF SPRINGFIELD,
because she helped me to write many of
the pieces, from the Golden Whales
of California to Alexander Campbell,
and because she danced
the Daniel Jazz.

For permission to reprint some of the verses in this volume the author is indebted to the courtesy of the editors and publishers of The Chicago Daily News, Poetry (Chicago), Contemporary Verse, The New Republic, The Forum, Books and the Book World of the New York Sun, Others, The Red Cross Magazine, Youth, The Independent, and William Stanley Braithwaite’s anthology entitled “Victory.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A WORD ON CALIFORNIA, PHOTOPLAYS, AND SAINT FRANCIS

In The Art of the Moving Picture, in the chapter on California and America, I said, in part:

“The moving picture captains of industry, like the California gold finders of 1849, making colossal fortunes in two or three years, have the same glorious irresponsibility and occasional need of the sheriff. They are Californians more literally than this. Around Los Angeles the greatest and most characteristic moving picture colonies are built. Each photoplay magazine has its California letter, telling of the putting up of new studios, and the transfer of actors with much slap-you-on-the-back personal gossip.

“... Every type of the photoplay but the intimate is founded on some phase of the out-of doors. Being thus dependent, the plant can best be set up where there is no winter. Besides this, the Los Angeles region has the sea, the mountains, the desert, and many kinds of grove and field....

“If the photoplay is the consistent utterance of its scenes, if the actors are incarnations of the land they walk upon, as they should be, California indeed stands a chance to achieve through the films an utterance of her own. Will this land, furthest west, be the first to capture the inner spirit of this newest and most curious of the arts?...

“People who revere the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 have often wished those gentlemen had moored their bark in the region of Los Angeles, rather than Plymouth Rock, that Boston had been founded there. At last that landing is achieved.

“Patriotic art students have discussed with mingled irony and admiration the Boston domination of the only American culture of the nineteenth century, namely, literature. Indianapolis has had her day since then. Chicago is lifting her head. Nevertheless Boston still controls the text book in English, and dominates our high schools. Ironic feelings in this matter, on the part of western men, are based somewhat on envy and illegitimate cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest hope of a healthful rivalry. They want new romanticists and artists as indigenous to their soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem, or Longfellow to the chestnuts of his native heath. Whatever may be said of the patriarchs, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bronson Alcott, they were true sons of the New England stone fences and meeting houses. They could not have been born or nurtured anywhere else on the face of the earth.

“Some of us view with a peculiar thrill the prospect that Los Angeles may become the Boston of the photoplay. Perhaps it would be better to say the Florence, because California reminds one of colorful Italy, more than of any part of the United States. Yet there is a difference.

“The present day man-in-the-street, man-about-town Californian has an obvious magnificence about him that is allied to the eucalyptus tree, the pomegranate....

“The enemy of California says the state is magnificent, but thin. He declares it is as though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian piece of gilt paper, and he who dampens his finger and thrusts it through finds an alkali valley on the other side, the lonely prickly pear, and a heap of ashes from a deserted camp-fire. He says the citizens of this state lack the richness of an æsthetic and religious tradition. He says there is no substitute for time. But even these things make for coincidence. This apparent thinness California has in common with the routine photoplay, which is at times as shallow in its thought as the shadow it throws upon the screen. This newness California has in common with all photoplays. It is thrillingly possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual tradition and depth together.

“Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many acres of land. “Good” Californians count their mines and enumerate their palm trees. They count the miles of their sea-coast, and the acres under cultivation and the height of the peaks, and revel in large statistics and the bigness generally, and forget how a few men rattle around in a great deal of scenery. They shout the statistics across the Rockies and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi valley is non-existent to the Californian. His fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast line. Through the geographical accident of separation by mountain and desert from the rest of the country, he becomes a mere shouter, hurrahing so assiduously that all variety in the voice is lost. Then he tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo.

“These are the defects of the motion picture qualities. Also its panoramic tendency runs wild. As an institution it advertises itself with a sweeping gesture. It has the same passion for coast-line. These are not the sins of New England. When, in the hands of masters, they become sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those of New England....

“When the Californian relegates the dramatic to secondary scenes, both in his life and his photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic and lyric, he and this instrument may find their immortality together as New England found its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon tide of Spring comes into California, through all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms the lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest garden is a jewelled pathway of wonder. But the Californian cannot shout ‘orange blossoms, orange blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope.’ He cannot boom forth ‘roseleaves, roseleaves’ so that he does their beauties justice. Here is where the photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance. And he can go on into stranger things, and evolve all the Splendor Films into higher types, for the very name of California is splendor.... The California photoplaywright can base his Crowd Picture upon the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco. He can derive his Patriotic and Religious Splendors from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely: the groves of the giant redwoods.

“The campaigns for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west coast, where, with the slightest care, grow up models for all the world of plant arrangement and tree-luxury. Our mechanical east is reproved, our tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged, every time we look upon those garden-paths and forests.

“It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our national text book in art, as Boston appropriated to herself the guardianship of the national text book of literature. If California has a shining soul, and not merely a golden body, let her forget her seventeen year old melodramatics, and turn to her poets who understand the heart underneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star-treader, George Sterling ... have, in their songs, seeds of better scenarios than California has sent us....

“California can tell us stories that are grim children of the tales of the wild Ambrose Bierce. Then there is the lovely unforgotten Nora May French, and the austere Edward Rowland Sill....”

All this from The Art of the Moving Picture may serve to answer many questions I have been asked as to my general ideas in the realms of art and verse, and it may more particularly elucidate my personal attitude toward California.

One item that should perhaps chasten the native son, is that these motion picture people, so truly the hope of California, are not native sons or daughters.

When I was in Los Angeles, visiting my cousin Ruby Vachel Lindsay, we discussed many of these items at great length, as we walked about the Los Angeles region together. I owe much of my conception of the more idealistic moods of the state to those conversations. Others who have shown me what might be called the Franciscan soul, of the Franciscan minority, are Professor and Mrs. E. Olan James, my host and hostess at Mills College. Another discriminating interpreter of the coast is that follower of Alexander Campbell, Peter Clark Macfarlane, to whom I owe much of my hope for a state that will some day gleam with spiritual and Franciscan, and not earthly gold.

When I think of California, I think so emphatically of these people and the things they have to say to the native sons, and the rest, that if the discussion in this volume is not considered conclusive, I refer the reader to these, and to the California poets, and to motion picture people like Anita Loos and John Emerson, people who still dream of things that are not gilded, and know the difference for instance, between St. Francis and Mammon. For a general view of those poets of California who make clear its spiritual gold, turn to “Golden Songs of the Golden State,” an anthology collected by Marguerite Wilkinson.

FIRST SECTION
THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES

THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA

Part I. A Short Walk Along the Coast

Yes, I have walked in California,

And the rivers there are blue and white.

Thunderclouds of grapes hang on the mountains.

Bears in the meadows pitch and fight.

(Limber, double-jointed lords of fate,

Proud native sons of the Golden Gate.)

And flowers burst like bombs in California,

Exploding on tomb and tower.

And the panther-cats chase the red rabbits,

Scatter their young blood every hour.

And the cattle on the hills of California

And the very swine in the holes

Have ears of silk and velvet

And tusks like long white poles.

And the very swine, big hearted,

Walk with pride to their doom

For they feed on the sacred raisins

Where the great black agates loom.

Goshawfuls are Burbanked with the grizzly bears.

At midnight their children come clanking up the stairs.

They wriggle up the canyons,

Nose into the caves,

And swallow the papooses and the Indian braves.

The trees climb so high the crows are dizzy

Flying to their nests at the top.

While the jazz-birds screech, and storm the brazen beach

And the sea-stars turn flip flop.

The solid Golden Gate soars up to Heaven.

Perfumed cataracts are hurled

From the zones of silver snow

To the ripening rye below,

To the land of the lemon and the nut

And the biggest ocean in the world.

While the Native Sons, like lords tremendous

Lift up their heads with chants sublime,

And the band-stands sound the trombone, the saxophone and xylophone

And the whales roar in perfect tune and time.

And the chanting of the whales of California

I have set my heart upon.

It is sometimes a play by Belasco,

Sometimes a tale of Prester John.

Part II. The Chanting of the Whales

North to the Pole, south to the Pole

The whales of California wallow and roll.

They dive and breed and snort and play

And the sun struck feed them every day

Boatloads of citrons, quinces, cherries,

Of bloody strawberries, plums and beets,

Hogsheads of pomegranates, vats of sweets,

And the he-whales’ chant like a cyclone blares,

Proclaiming the California noons

So gloriously hot some days

The snake is fried in the desert

And the flea no longer plays.

There are ten gold suns in California

When all other lands have one,

For the Golden Gate must have due light

And persimmons be well-done.

And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash

And the fume of the hollow sea.

Rally and roam in the loblolly foam

And whoop that their souls are free.

(Limber, double-jointed lords of fate,

Proud native sons of the Golden Gate.)

And they chant of the forty-niners

Who sailed round the cape for their loot

With guns and picks and washpans

And a dagger in each boot.

How the richest became the King of England,

The poorest became the King of Spain,

The bravest a colonel in the army,

And a mean one went insane.

The ten gold suns are so blasting

The sunstruck scoot for the sea

And turn to mermen and mermaids

And whoop that their souls are free.

(Limber, double-jointed lords of fate,

Proud native sons of the Golden Gate.)

And they take young whales for their bronchos

And old whales for their steeds,

Harnessed with golden seaweeds,

And driven with golden reeds.

They dance on the shore throwing roseleaves.

They kiss all night throwing hearts.

They fight like scalded wildcats

When the least bit of fighting starts.

They drink, these belly-busting devils

And their tremens shake the ground.

And then they repent like whirlwinds

And never were such saints found.

They will give you their plug tobacco.

They will give you the shirts off their backs.

They will cry for your every sorrow,

Put ham in your haversacks.

And they feed the cuttlefishes, whales and skates

With dates and figs in bales and crates:—

Shiploads of sweet potatoes, peanuts, rutabagas,

Honey in hearts of gourds:

Grapefruits and oranges barrelled with apples,

And spices like sharp sweet swords.

Part III. St. Francis of San Francisco

But the surf is white, down the long strange coast

With breasts that shake with sighs,

And the ocean of all oceans

Holds salt from weary eyes.

St. Francis comes to his city at night

And stands in the brilliant electric light

And his swans that prophesy night and day

Would soothe his heart that wastes away:

The giant swans of California

That nest on the Golden Gate

And beat through the clouds serenely

And on St. Francis wait.

But St. Francis shades his face in his cowl

And stands in the street like a lost grey owl.

He thinks of gold ... gold.

He sees on far redwoods

Dewfall and dawning:

Deep in Yosemite

Shadows and shrines:

He hears from far valleys

Prayers by young Christians,

He sees their due penance

So cruel, so cold;

He sees them made holy,

White-souled like young aspens

With whimsies and fancies untold:—

The opposite of gold.

And the mighty mountain swans of California

Whose eggs are like mosque domes of Ind,

Cry with curious notes

That their eggs are good for boats

To toss upon the foam and the wind.

He beholds on far rivers

The venturesome lovers

Sailing for the sea

All night

In swanshells white.

He sees them far on the ocean prevailing

In a year and a month and a day of sailing

Leaving the whales and their whoop unfailing

On through the lightning, ice and confusion

North of the North Pole,

South of the South Pole,

And west of the west of the west of the west,

To the shore of Heartache’s Cure,

The opposite of gold,

On and on like Columbus

With faith and eggshell sure.

Part IV. The Voice of the Earthquake

But what is the earthquake’s cry at last

Making St. Francis yet aghast:—

From here on, the audience joins in the refrain:—“gold, gold, gold.”

“Oh the flashing cornucopia of haughty California

Is gold, gold, gold.

Their brittle speech and their clutching reach

Is gold, gold, gold.

What is the fire-engine’s ding dong bell?

The burden of the burble of the bull-frog in the well?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the color of the cup and plate

And knife and fork of the chief of state?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the flavor of the Bartlett pear?

What is the savor of the salt sea air?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the color of the sea-girl’s hair?

Gold, gold, gold.

In the church of Jesus and the streets of Venus:—

Gold, gold, gold.

What color are the cradle and the bridal bed?

What color are the coffins of the great grey dead?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the hue of the big whales’ hide?

Gold, gold, gold.

What is the color of their guts’ inside?

Gold, gold, gold.

“What is the color of the pumpkins in the moonlight?

Gold, gold, gold.

The color of the moth and the worm in the starlight?

Gold, gold, gold.”

KALAMAZOO

Once, in the city of Kalamazoo,

The gods went walking, two and two,

With the friendly phœnix, the stars of Orion,

The speaking pony and singing lion.

For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart

Lived the girl with the innocent heart.

Thenceforth the city of Kalamazoo

Was the envied, intimate chum of the sun.

He rose from a cave by the principal street.

The lions sang, the dawn-horns blew,

And the ponies danced on silver feet.

He hurled his clouds of love around;

Deathless colors of his old heart

Draped the houses and dyed the ground.

Oh shrine of the wide young Yankee land,

Incense city of Kalamazoo,

That held, in the midnight, the priceless sun

As a jeweller holds an opal in hand!

From the awkward city of Oshkosh came

Love the bully no whip shall tame,

Bringing his gang of sinners bold.

And I was the least of his Oshkosh men;

But none were reticent, none were old.

And we joined the singing phœnix then,

And shook the lilies of Kalamazoo

All for one hidden butterfly.

Bulls of glory, in cars of war

We charged the boulevards, proud to die

For her ribbon sailing there on high.

Our blood set gutters all aflame,

Where the sun slept without any shame,

Cold rock till he must rise again.

She made great poets of wolf-eyed men—

The dear queen-bee of Kalamazoo,

With her crystal wings, and her honey heart.

We fought for her favors a year and a day

(Oh, the bones of the dead, the Oshkosh dead,

That were scattered along her pathway red!)

And then, in her harum-scarum way,

She left with a passing traveller-man—

With a singing Irishman

Went to Japan.

Why do the lean hyenas glare

Where the glory of Artemis had begun—

Of Atalanta, Joan of Arc,

Lorna Doone, Rosy O’Grady,

And Orphant Annie, all in one?

Who burned this city of Kalamazoo

Till nothing was left but a ribbon or two—

One scorched phœnix that mourned in the dew,

Acres of ashes, a junk-man’s cart,

A torn-up letter, a dancing shoe,

(And the bones of the valiant dead)?

Who burned this city of Kalamazoo—

Love-town, Troy-town Kalamazoo?

A harum-scarum innocent heart.

JOHN L. SULLIVAN, THE STRONG BOY OF BOSTON

Inscribed to Louis Untermeyer and Robert Frost

When I was nine years old, in 1889

I sent my love a lacy Valentine.

Suffering boys were dressed like Fauntleroys,

While Judge and Puck in giant humor vied.

The Gibson Girl came shining like a bride

To spoil the cult of Tennyson’s Elaine.

Louisa Alcott was my gentle guide....

Then ...

I heard a battle trumpet sound.

Nigh New Orleans

Upon an emerald plain

John L. Sullivan

The strong boy

Of Boston