The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems Part 5

I opened the ink-well and smoke filled the room.

The smoke formed the giant frog-cat of my doom.

His web feet left dreadful slime tracks on the floor.

He had hammer and nails that he laid by the door.

He sprawled on the table, claw-hands in my hair.

He looked through my heart to the mud that was there.

Like a black-mailer hating his victim he spoke: "When I see all your squirming I laugh till I choke Singing of peace. Railing at battle.

Soothing a handful with saccharine prattle.

All the millions of earth have voted for fight.

You are voting for talk, with hands lily white."

He leaped to the floor, then grew seven feet high, Beautiful, terrible, scorn in his eye: The Devil Eternal, Apollo grown old, With beard of bright silver and garments of gold.

"What will you do to end war for good?

Will you stand by the book-case, be nailed to the wood?"

I stretched out my arms. He drove the nails deep, Silently, coolly. The house was asleep, I hung for three years, forbidden to die.

I seemed but a shadow the servants pa.s.sed by.

At the end of the time with hot irons he returned.

"The Quitter Sublime" on my bosom he burned.

As he seared me he hissed: "You are wearing away.

The good angels tell me you leave them today.

You want to come down from the nails in the door.

The victor must hang there three hundred years more.

If any prig-saint would outvote all mankind He must use an immortally resolute mind.

Think what the saints of Benares endure, Through infinite birthpangs their courage is sure.

Self-tortured, self-ruled, they build their powers high, Until they are G.o.ds, overmaster the sky."

Then he pulled out the nails. He shouted "Come in."

To heal me there stepped in a lady of sin.

Her hand was in mine. We walked in the sun.

She said: "Now forget them, the Saxon and Hun.

You are dreary and aged and silly and weak.

Let us smell the sweet groves. Let the summertime speak."

We walked to the river. We swam there in state.

I was a serpent. She was my mate.

I forgot in the marsh, as I tumbled about, That trial in my room, where I did not hold out.

Since I was a serpent, my mate seemed to me As a mermaiden seems to a fisher at sea, Or a whisky soaked girl to a whisky soaked king.

I woke. She had turned to a ravening thing On the table--a buzzard with leperous head.

She tore up my rhymes and my drawings. She said: "I am your own cheap bankrupt soul.

Will you die for the nations, making them whole?

We joy in the swamp and here we are gay.

WILL YOU BRING YOUR FINE PEACE TO THE NATIONS TODAY?"

"This, My Song, Is Made for Kerensky"

(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 bra.s.s watches, Silly anarchists yell their ills.

Shall we be as weird as these?

In the breezes nod and wheeze?

Heaven's ma.s.s is sung, Tomorrow's ma.s.s is sung In a spirit tongue By wind and dust and birds, The high ma.s.s of liberty, While wave the banners red: Sung round the soap-box, A ma.s.s 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 queer 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:-- Battles.h.i.+p 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!

August, 1917.

Fourth Section Tragedies, Comedies, and Dreams