cerusee | Entries tagged with lindsay vachel

Vachel Lindsay, "A Net to Snare the Moonlight"

[What the Man of Faith said]

The dew, the rain and moonlight
All prove our Father's mind.
The dew, the rain and moonlight
Descend to bless mankind.

Come, let us see that all men
Have land to catch the rain,
Have grass to snare the spheres of dew,
And fields spread for the grain.

Yea, we would give to each poor man
Ripe wheat and poppies red, —
A peaceful place at evening
With the stars just overhead:

A net to snare the moonlight,
A sod spread to the sun,
A place of toil by daytime,
Of dreams when toil is done.

Vachel Lindsay, "Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket."

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

Man is a curious brute--he pets his fancies--
Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury.
So he will be, tho' law be clear as crystal,
Tho' all men plan to live in harmony.

Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.

Excerpted from "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan," Vachel Lindsay's 1919 ode to William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 election.

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 splendor,
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 the 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 matching tune.

See y'all on Tuesday. Don't forget to vote.

My favorite poetry anthology is called A Journey of Poems: An Original Anthology of Verse: Pope/Tennyson/Frost/Byron/Auden/Updike and forty-nine others, edited by Richard F. Niebling, published by Dell in 1964, retailing at that time for forty-five cents. I bought it at a library sale for ten cents maybe, hmm, six or seven years ago? It's a little paperback thing, weighing about two ounces--I actually took it with me when I went to Scotland for four months with only two small suitcases, and I read from it when I felt homesick. I love it as a book, I love the poems, I love it as an artifact of my past. It's my favorite book of poetry, even more than The Selected Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, because it's not just a collection of one form, or theme, or era, or poet, but...a journey. The chapters are organized by theme--hope, horror, despair, birth, death, music--and because it's such a little thing, touching oh so lightly on the canon of English poetry, every poem in it is good. I haven't read them all. I'm not in a hurry. It's a journey.

I memorized this out of it six or seven years ago, and since forgot it even existed, but as soon as I saw the title, I was able to recite it.

Vachel Lindsay, "The Leaden-Eyed."

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime that its babes grow dull
Its poor are oxlike, limp, and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

to what purpose do you return again?

Entries tagged with lindsay vachel

April is National Poetry Month! Vachel Lindsay, "A Net to Snare the Moonlight"

it is the night before the day

they said this day would never come

April is National Poetry Month!

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