Written by
Vachel Lindsay |
(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)
O market square, O slattern place,
Is glory in your slack disgrace?
Plump quack doctors sell their pills,
Gentle grafters sell brass watches,
Silly anarchists yell their ills.
Shall we be as weird as these?
In the breezes nod and wheeze?
Heaven's mass is sung,
Tomorrow's mass is sung
In a spirit tongue
By wind and dust and birds,
The high mass of liberty,
While wave the banners red:
Sung round the soap-box,
A mass for soldiers dead.
When you leave your faction in the once-loved hall,
Like a true American tongue-lash them all,
Stand then on the corner under starry skies
And get you a gang of the worn and the wise.
The soldiers of the Lord may be squeaky when they rally,
The soldiers of the Lord are a ***** little army,
But the soldiers of the Lord, before the year is through,
Will gather the whole nation, recruit all creation,
To smite the hosts abhorred, and all the heavens renew —
Enforcing with the bayonet the thing the ages teach —
Free speech!
Free speech!
Down with the Prussians, and all their works.
Down with the Turks.
Down with every army that fights against the soap-box,
The Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box,
The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-box,
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box,
The Karl Marx, Henry George, Woodrow Wilson soap-box.
We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box,
The everlasting foe of beastliness and tyranny,
Platform of liberty: — Magna Charta liberty,
Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding Kansas liberty,
New-born Russian liberty: —
Battleship of thought,
The round world over,
Loved by the red-hearted,
Loved by the broken-hearted,
Fair young Amazon or proud tough rover,
Loved by the lion,
Loved by the lion,
Loved by the lion,
Feared by the fox.
The Russian Revolution is the world revolution.
Death at the bedstead of every Kaiser knocks.
The Hohenzollern army shall be felled like the ox.
The fatal hour is striking in all the doomsday clocks.
The while, by freedom's alchemy
Beauty is born.
Ring every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell,
Blow the clear trumpet, and listen for the answer: —
The blast from the sky of the Gabriel horn.
Hail the Russian picture around the little box: —
Exiles,
Troops in files,
Generals in uniform,
Mujiks in their smocks,
And holy maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks.
All the peoples and the nations in processions mad and great,
Are rolling through the Russian Soul as through a city gate: —
As though it were a street of stars that paves the shadowy deep.
And mighty Tolstoi leads the van along the stairway steep.
But now the people shout:
"Hail to Kerensky,
He hurled the tyrants out."
And this my song is made for Kerensky,
Prophet of the world-wide intolerable hope,
There on the soap-box, seasoned, dauntless,
There amid the Russian celestial kaleidoscope,
Flags of liberty, rags and battlesmoke.
Moscow and Chicago!
Come let us praise battling Kerensky,
Bravo! Bravo!
Comrade Kerensky the thunderstorm and rainbow!
Comrade Kerensky, Bravo, Bravo!
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Written by
Delmore Schwartz |
I should have been a plumber fixing drains.
And mending pure white bathtubs for the great Diogenes
(who scorned all lies, all liars, and all tyrannies),
And then, perhaps, he would bestow on me -- majesty!
(O modesty aside, forgive my fallen pride, O hidden
majesty,
The lamp, the lantern, the lucid light he sought for
All too often -- sick humanity!)
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Written by
William Strode |
Preethee stand still awhile, and view this tree
Renown'd and honour'd for antiquitie
By all the neighbour twiggs; for such are all
The trees adjoyning, bee they nere so tall,
Comparde to this: if here Jacke Maypole stood
All men would sweare 'twere but a fishing rodde.
Mark but the gyant trunk, which when you see
You see how many woods and groves there bee
Compris'd within one elme. The hardy stocke
Is knotted like a clubb, and who dares mocke
His strength by shaking it? Each brawny limbe
Could pose the centaure Monychus, or him
That wav'de a hundred hands ere hee could wield
That sturdy waight, whose large extent might shield
A poore man's tenement. Greate Ceres' oake
Which Erisichthon feld, could not provoke
Halfe so much hunger for his punishment
As hewing this would doe by consequent.
Nothing but age could tame it: Age came on,
And loe a lingering consumption
Devour'd the entralls, where an hollow cave
Without the workman's helpe beganne to have
The figure of a Tent: a pretty cell
Where grand Silenus might not scorne to dwell,
And owles might feare to harbour, though they brought
Minerva's warrant for to bear them out
In this their bold attempt. Looke down into
The twisted curles, the wreathing to and fro
Contrived by nature: where you may descry
How hall and parlour, how the chambers lie.
And wer't not strange to see men stand alone
On leggs of skinne without or flesh or bone?
Or that the selfe same creature should survive
After the heart is dead? This tree can thrive
Thus maym'd and thus impayr'd: no other proppe,
But only barke remayns to keep it uppe.
Yet thus supported it doth firmly stand,
Scorning the saw-pitt, though so neere at hand.
No yawning grave this grandsire Elme can fright,
Whilst yongling trees are martyr'd in his sight.
O learne the thrift of Nature, that maintaines
With needy myre stolne upp in hidden veynes
So great a bulke of wood. Three columes rest
Upon the rotten trunke, wherof the least
Were mast for Argos. Th' open backe below
And three long leggs alone doe make it shew
Like a huge trivett, or a monstrous chayre
With the heeles turn'd upward. How proper, O how fayre
A seate were this for old Diogenes
To grumble in and barke out oracles,
And answere to the Raven's augury
That builds above. Why grew not this strange tree
Neere Delphos? had this wooden majesty
Stood in Dodona forrest, then would Jove
Foregoe his oake, and only this approve.
Had those old Germans that did once admire
Deformed Groves; and worshipping with fire
Burnt men unto theyr gods: had they but seene
These horrid stumps, they canonizde had beene,
And highly too. This tree would calme more gods
Than they had men to sacrifice by odds.
You Hamadryades, that wood-borne bee,
Tell mee the causes, how this portly tree
Grew to this haughty stature? Was it then
Because the mummys of so many men
Fattned the ground? or cause the neighbor spring
Conduits of water to the roote did bring?
Was it with Whitsun sweat, or ample snuffes
Of my Lord's beere that such a bignesse stuffes
And breaks the barke? O this it is, no doubt:
This tree, I warrant you, can number out
Your Westwell annals, & distinctly tell
The progresse of this hundred years, as well
By Lords and Ladies, as ere Rome could doe
By Consulships. These boughes can witnesse too
How goodman Berry tript it in his youth,
And how his daughter Joane, of late forsooth
Became her place. It might as well have grown,
If Pan had pleas'd, on toppe of Westwell downe,
Instead of that proud Ash; and easily
Have given ayme to travellers passing by
With wider armes. But see, it more desirde
Here to bee lov'd at home than there admirde:
And porter-like it here defends the gate,
As if it once had beene greate Askapate.
Had warlike Arthur's dayes enjoy'd this Elme
Sir Tristram's blade and good Sir Lancelot's helme
Had then bedeckt his locks, with fertile store
Of votive reliques which those champions wore:
Untill perhaps (as 'tis with great men found)
Those burdenous honours crusht it to the ground:
But in these merry times 'twere farre more trimme
If pipes and citterns hung on every limbe;
And since the fidlers it hath heard so long,
I'me sure by this time it deserves my song.
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Written by
Carl Sandburg |
I SAW a telegram handed a two hundred pound man at a desk. And the little scrap of paper charged the air like a set of crystals in a chemist’s tube to a whispering pinch of salt.
Cross my heart, the two hundred pound man had just cracked a joke about a new hat he got his wife, when the messenger boy slipped in and asked him to sign. He gave the boy a nickel, tore the envelope and read.
Then he yelled “Good God,” jumped for his hat and raincoat, ran for the elevator and took a taxi to a railroad depot.
As I say, it was like a set of crystals in a chemist’s tube and a whispering pinch of salt.
I wonder what Diogenes who lived in a tub in the sun would have commented on the affair.
I know a shoemaker who works in a cellar slamming half-soles onto shoes, and when I told him, he said: “I pay my bills, I love my wife, and I am not afraid of anybody.”
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Written by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
THUS roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes,
Now serious am, now seek to please;
Now love and hate in turn one sees;
The motives now are those, now these;
Now nothings, now realities.
Thus roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes.
1810.
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Written by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
WHEN Diogenes quietly sunn'd himself in his barrel,
When Calanus with joy leapt in the flame-breathing grave,
Oh, what noble lessons were those for the rash son of Philip,
Were not the lord of the world e'en for instruction too great!
1789.*
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Written by
Amy Levy |
More blest than was of old Diogenes,
I have not held my lantern up in vain.
Not mine, at least, this evil--to complain:
"There is none honest among all of these."
Our hopes go down that sailed before the breeze;
Our creeds upon the rock are rent in twain;
Something it is, if at the last remain
One floating spar cast up by hungry seas.
The secret of our being, who can tell?
To praise the gods and Fate is not my part;
Evil I see, and pain ; within my heart
There is no voice that whispers: "All is well."
Yet fair are days in summer; and more fair
The growths of human goodness here and there.
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