Part 3

In 1833 a man named Hallam, A friend of Alfred’s, died at twenty-two. Thereafter Alfred worked his hopes and fears Upon the dark impasto of this loss In delicate colors. And in 1850 When you were sunk in melancholia, As one of no use in the world, adjudged To be of no use by your time and place, Alfred brought forth his Dante dream of life, Received the laureate wreath and settled down With a fair wife amid entrancing richness Of sunny seas and silken sails and dreams Of Araby, And ivied halls, and meadows where the breeze Of temperate England blows the hurrying cloud. There, seated like an Oriental king In silk and linen clothed took the acclaim Of England and the world!... This is the year You sit in a little office there in Springfield, Feet on the desk and brood. What are you thinking? You’re forty-one; around you spears are whacking The wind-mills of the day, you watch and weigh. The sun-light of your mind quivers about The darkness every thinking soul must know, And lights up hidden things behind the door, And in dark corners. You have fathomed much, Weighed life and men. O what a spheréd brain, Strong nerved, fresh blooded, firm in plasmic fire, And ready for a task, if there be one! That is the question that makes brooding thought: For you know well men come into the world And find no task, and die, and are not known-- Great spheréd brains gone into dust again, Their light under a bushel all their days! In 1859, Charles publishes His “Origin of Species,” and ’tis said You see it, or at least hear what it is. Out of three travelers in a distant land One writes a book of what the three have seen. Perhaps you never read much, yet perhaps Some books were just a record of your mind. How had it helped you in your work to read The “Idylls of the King”? As much, perhaps, Had Alfred read the Northwest Ordinance Of 1787....

But in this year Of ’59 you’re sunk in blackest thought About the country maybe, but, I think, About this riddle of our mortal life. You were a poet, Abraham, from your birth. That makes you think, and makes you deal at last With things material to the tune of laws Moving in higher spaces when you’re called To act--and show a poet moulding stuff Too tough for spirits practical to mould. Here are you with your feet upon the desk. You have been beaten in a cause which kept Some strings too loose to catch the vibrate waves Of a great Harp whose music you have sensed. You are a mathematician using symbols Like Justice, Truth, with keenness to perceive Disturbance of equations, a logician Who sees invariable laws, and beauty born Of finding out and following the laws. You are a Plato brooding there in Springfield. You are a poet with a voice for Truth, And never to be claimed by visionaries Who chant the theme of bread and bread alone.

But here and now They want you not for Senator, it seems. You have been tossed to one side by the rush Of world events, left stranded and alone, And fitted for no use, it seems, in Springfield. A country lawyer with a solid logic, And gift of prudent phrase which has a way Of hardening under time to rock as hard As the enduring thought you seal it with. You’ve reached your fiftieth year, your occultation Should pass. If ever, we should see a light: In all your life you have not seen a city. But now our Springfield giant strides Broadway, Thrills William Cullen Bryant, sets a wonder Going about the East, that Kirkham’s grammar Can give a man such speech at Cooper Union, Which even Alfred’s, trained to Virgil’s style, Cannot disdain for matching in the thought With faultless clearness. And still in 1860 all the Brahmins Have fear to give you power. You are a backwoodsman, a country lawyer Unlettered in the difficult art of states. A denizen of a squalid western town, Dowered with a knack of argument alone, Which wakes the country school-house, and may lift Its devotees to Congress by good fortune. But then at Cooper Union intuitive eyes Had measured your tall frame, and careful speech, Your strength and self-possession. Then they came With that dramatic sense which is American Into the hall with rails which you had split, And called you Honest Abe, and wearing badges With your face on them and the poor catch words Of Honest Abe, as if you were a referee Like Honest Kelly, when in truth no man Had ever been your intimate, ever slapped you With brisk familiarity, or called you Anything but Mr. Lincoln, never Abe, or Abraham, and never used The Hello Bill of salutation to you-- O great patrician, therefore fit to be Great democrat as well!

In 1862 Charles publishes “How Orchid Flowers are Fertilized by Insects,” And you give forth a proclamation saying “The Union must have peace, or I wipe out The blot of negro slavery. You see, The symphony’s the thing, and if you mar it, Contending over slavery, I remove The source of the disharmony. I admit The freedom of the press--but for the Union. When you abuse the Union, you shall stop. And when you are in jail, no habeas corpus Shall bring relief--I have suspended it.” To-day they call you libertarian-- Well, so you were, but just as Beauty is, And Truth is, even if they curb and vanquish The lower heights of beauty and of truth. They take your speech and deeds and give you place In Hebrew temples with Ezekiel, Habakkuk and Isaiah--you emerge From this association, master man! You are not of the faith that breeds the ethic Wranglers, who make economic goals The strain and test of life. You are not one, Spite of your lash and sword threat, who believe God will avenge the weak. That is the dream Which builds millenniums where disharmonies That make the larger harmony shall cease-- A dream not yours. And they shall lose you who Enthrone you as a prophet who cut through The circle of our human sphere of life To let in wrath and judgments, final tests On Life around the price of sparrows, weights Wherewith bread shall be weighed....

There is a windless flame where cries and tears, Where hunger, strife, and war and human blood No shadow cast, and where the love of Truth, Which is not love of individual souls, Finds solace in a Judgment of our life. That is the Flame that took both Charles and You-- O leader in a Commonwealth of Thought!

VIII

GRANT AND LOGAN AND OUR TEARS

’Twixt certain parallels of latitude; Say thirty-seven and forty-two and more; And certain meridians, say ninety-one And eighty-seven plus. The top line drawn to leave the lower lake Shaped like a drinking cup to meet your needs; To bind you to the east and west, Save you from tributary servitude Through Mississippi’s River to the south. No sheds of hills to guard you on the north Against the arctic winds loosed at the pole, Or Medicine Hat parturient as the bag Of Mad Æolus. The valley and the river just a hall-way Making a draft for tropic heat in summer-- Well, here you are in physiography.

Upon a time black soil was poured Over your surface as the cook Pours chocolate on a cake. So you are fertile, never a land so rich.

A little river flowing in the lake Vanishing in marshes up a mile or so Makes for a portage to another stream Which empties in another stream which empties Into the Mississippi. A spot between the lake and river lies Upon the highway binding east and west, And from the south and north where traders meet. This is the very place to build a fort-- The fort becomes a town within a year, A great metropolis in half a cycle.

Within a lifetime you have gained Some seven million souls. The land of Luther sends a swarming host; And Milton’s land adventurous sons; And Scandinavia’s realm, And Michael Angelo’s mountains, All Europe pours her wealth Of brawn and spirit on you, Until you are an empire Of restless vital men, and teeming towns.

Before you were grown rich, And populous You brightened history; Great men came from you. But now that you have cities and great treasure Where are your great ones? What is your genius? What star enwraps your eyes?

What heights allure you? Hermaphroditic giant, sad and drunk Not gay, but foolish, stuffed with new baked bread, Who took away your gland pituitary, Abandoned you to such exaggerate growth Without increase of soul? You blasphemous, yet afraid, Licentious, yet ashamed, Swaggering, yet blubbering And boasting of your rights. Materialist who woos the spiritual, Who holds aloft the cross from which you’ve sold The nails to junk-men. And makes a hackle from the crown of thorns Wherewith to hackle hemp to make a rope For your own hanging in the Philippines! Who with one hand grabs off the widow’s mite, And with the other tosses golden coins Into the beggar’s cup. The black-snake whip in one hand, in the other A plentiful supply of surgeon’s tape. Oh you! A hard oppressor, charitably inclined, And keen to see and take the outward image-- Devoid of categories to reduce Its truth and meaning.

No seed of old world thistles should be sown here, Or let to fly upon this soil. Yet dogma has been sown here Men rise thereby who sow the seed again; Accessory spirits keep the ground well stirred. It’s gold and then it’s power, but gold at last. And for the rest what are your dominant breeds? Smug cultures where the aggregate mind is leather Gorged with the oil respectability Impervious to thought. These pick the eunuch type as being safe, American, it’s called: Sleek, quiet, smiling, ready servitors Who for the salary, and that alone, (Require no bribes) Effect the business will.

You are a hollow thing of steel, a cauldron, No monument of freedom. You’re lettered, it is true, With many luminous truths that came to be Through deeds of men who died for liberty. But inside you there is a seething compost Of public schools, the ballot, journalism, Laws, jurisprudence, dogma, gold the chief Ingredient all stirred into a brew Wherewith to feed yourself and keep yourself The thing you are! Not wholly slave, not really free, Desiring vaguely to be master moral, And yet too sicklied over by old truths, The ballot, fear, plebian spirit, lack of mind, To reach patrician levels-- Hermaphroditic giant, misty-eyed, Half blinded by ideals, half by greed!

Can nothing but a war, The prospect of a slaughter or the prize Of foreign lands, shake off your lethargy, And make you seem as big in spirit as You are in body? Would you not love the general weal improved? Would you not love your towns made beautiful? Your halls and courts Reclaimed from dicers’ oaths? Your laws made just and tuned to god-like laws? Your weights and measures made invariable? Is there no tonic in such hopes as these To rouse you, giant?

I think you are Delilah Tricked out as Liberty for a fancy ball, Spiritless, provincal, shabby, dull, Where no ways gentle, no natural mirth prevails. You’ve put your Samson’s eye out; he would see. You’ve chained him to the grinder, he would play, Be wise and human, free, courageous, fair, Of cleaner flesh and nobler spirit. Look He may pull down your bastard temple yet, And make you use pentelic marble for Rebuilding of the Parthenon you planned, And leave the misse stone thrown in a heap For sheep gates in the walls of Ancient Zion!

THE MUNICIPAL PIER

Great snail whose lofty horns are knobbed with gold; Long javelin of red-wood lying straight Upon the changing indigos which unfold In blues and chrysophrases from the gate Of this our city sea-ward, till the gull Becomes a gnat where lights annihilate The wings’ last beat! Or are you like a hull Pompeiian red upon the Nile’s slate green? Or are you like these clouds which fanciful Half open eyes make giant fish serene, And motionless as rifts of carbuncles Sunk in a waste of faience sky, between Such terrifying turquoise? Darkness dulls The torches of your towers struck to flame By sun-set, and you mass amid the hulls Of shadows on the water, then reclaim This blackness with a thousand eyes of light! Peiræus made with hands, which over-came The waters, where no point of land gave might To walls and slips, no Peiraic promontory Inspired our Hippodamus in his flight Sea-ward with docks, parades, an auditory For music and a dancing floor for youths, But only the sea tempted. Telling the story That grows within the loop, its dens and booths, And palaces of trade, is to omit The city’s lofty genius and the truths Through which she works at best, against the wit Of creatures who would sell her body, take The money of the sale as perquisite For grossness in luxurious life. Awake Themistocles of us and carve the dream Of Burnham into stone! Along this lake Such as no city looks on, to redeem Its shores from shrieks and crashes, refuse, smoke His architectural vision sketched the scheme Of harbors, islands, boulevards--he spoke For these, the concourse, stadium and a tomb For that dull infamy of filth whose cloak Is law, hiding the greedy hands that doom To long delay with bribery. He is gone These several years into the narrow room Where beauty is no more of walk or lawn, Or arch or peristyle, but still he says: “Work quickly into form what I have drawn, And give Chicago of these middle days The glory which it merits: To this Pier Make wide the marble way, build new the quays Give to the swimmers depths made fresh and clear, Lay out the flowering gardens, founts and pools Such as Versailles knows. The river steer Under the arches of two decked bascules.” Look at the photographs of seventy-six, Whoever you are who mocks or ridicules This city, then imagine stones and bricks Which from such lowness rose, in fifty years By so much grown miraculous to transfix The future’s wonder as ours is for piers Like this, Chicago! O ye men who wield Small strength or great or none, too apt at sneers For men who did too little, you must yield Your names for judgment soon, have you done more To make this city great than Marshall Field? While you were railing, idling, on this shore Hands silent, out of sight were plunged in toil. You woke one morning to the waters’ roar And saw these gilded turrets flash and spoil The sun-light of the spring. What have you sown Of truth or beauty in this eager soil To make your living felt, your labor known? Sometimes I see silk banners in the sky, And hear the sound of silver trumpets blown, And bells high turreted. And passing by This firmament of rolling blue great throngs Stream in an air of brilliant sun where I A century gone am of it, when my songs Are but a record of a day that died, And saw the end of desecrating wrongs. How sweet bells are borne on the evening tide High up where heaven is flushed and the moon’s sphere Looks down on temples, arches, where the wide Eternal waters thunder round the Pier!

GOBINEAU TO TREE

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.