I. Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing and the night cold and the night long and the river to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going
When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine Like the burnished spears of a field of gold; When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine, And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold; Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle, For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.
And you take a stalk that is straight and long, With an expert eye to its worthy points, And you think of the bubbling strains of song That are bound between its pithy joints— Then you cut out strings, with a bridge in the middle, With a corn-stalk bow for a corn-stalk fiddle.
Compassionate eyes had our brave John Brown, And a craggy stern forehead, a militant frown; He, the storm-bow of peace. Give him volley on volley, The fool who redeemed us once of our folly, And the smiter that healed us, our right John Brown!
Too vehement, verily, was John Brown! For waiting is statesmanlike; his the renown Of the holy rash arm, the equipper and starter Of freedmen; aye, call him fanatic and martyr: He can carry both halos, our plain John Brown.
A scandalous stumbling-block was John Brown, And a jeer; but ah! soon from the terrified town, In his bleeding track made over hilltop and hollow,
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero! How just and true that this great nation, being conceived In liberty by fugitives should find —Strange ways and plays of monstrous History— This Hamlet-type to be the President—
This failure, this unwilling bridegroom, This tricky lawyer full of black despair—
In flat America, in Chicago, Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. Forty feet of Corinthian candle celebrate Pullman embedded lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. The Potter Palmers float in an island parthenon. Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
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