We Who Revolt
We who revolt against life’s iron bars,
And teach the world’s unthinking how to think,
We who make causes flame like burning stars,
And urge the multitude toward the brink
Of freer worlds—what do we hope to gain?
We who with all life’s colors are aglow,
When we have poured the madness of our brain
Into dead streams of thought, to make them rise and flow?
Reckless we live, careless of clothes or victuals,
And all the things that tend to blind and bind.
Our thoughts are tongues of fire, our words are sickles
To clear the jungle growth around man’s mind.
What can we gain—we who are consecrate
To realize a dream of finer stuff
Than comfortable sleep can generate?
To be our sure rebellious selves: Is that enough?
We who create the visions of mankind,
And of its dim desires forge golden things,
Flinging its thoughts unto the sowing wind,
When we have given to them immortal wings!
We who make hymns, high music of revolt,
Who work at words like sailors at the ropes,
So that they strike men like a thunder bolt,
What can we ask of human works, and what our hopes?
We shall see prancing tyrants in the place
Of shattered kings, an unctuous renegade
Planting his foot upon a broken mace,
Posing a smith’s hammer, a peasant’s spade!
And we shall see the thoughts we loved so well
Twisted and torn and mangled into shapes
More hideous than the fancied forms of hell,
To strengthen the old tyranny of new-crowned apes.
Oh, nought we have to gain! We hope for nought!
Yet we must sound the call and onward press,
For tyranny eternal must be fought,
Whether he dons a king’s or peasant’s dress.
The Brute may be triumphant everywhere—
No dreams we cherish of a perfect world—
But we possess our wills to do and dare,
Revolt with pennants streaming and with flags unfurled!
1925
Like a Strong Tree
Like a strong tree that in the virgin earth
Sends far its roots through rock and loam and clay,
And proudly thrives in rain or time of dearth,
When the dry waves scare rainy sprites away;
Like a strong tree that reaches down, deep, deep,
For sunken water, fluid underground,
Where the great-ringed unsightly blind worms creep,
And queer things of the nether world abound:
So would I live in rich imperial growth,
Touching the surface and the depth of things,
Instinctively responsive unto both,
Tasting the sweets of being and the stings,
Sensing the subtle spell of changing forms,
Like a strong tree against a thousand storms.
1925
Russian Cathedral
Bow down my soul in worship very low
And in the holy silences be lost.
Bow down before the marble man of woe,
Bow down before the singing angel host.
What jewelled glory fills my spirit’s eye!
What golden grandeur moves the depths of me!
The soaring arches lift me up on high
Taking my breath with their rare symmetry.
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone.
1925
The Mulatto
Because I am the white man’s son—his own,
Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
I will dispute his title to his throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.
There is a searing hate within my soul,
A hate that only kin can feel for kin,
A hate that makes me vigorous and whole,
And spurs me on unceasingly to win.
Because I am my cruel father’s child,
My love of justice stirs me up to hate,
A warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled,
When falls the hour I shall not hesitate,
Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife
To gain the utmost freedom that is life.
1925
A Daughter of the American Revolution to Her Son
I’m happy that you graduated high,
It stirs my pride to see what you could do
In these times, when our ways are all awry
And threatened by the vulgar parvenu.
Our noble name is linked with all the good
New England yielded from her sterling worth,
To make our country great and understood
Among the greater nations of the earth.
Our line is of a sturdy English breed,
That sought an alien land for human rights;
We always have insisted on the need
Of viewing life from our own lofty heights.
Only your great grandfather once went wrong,
Becoming radical in slavery days,
When party strife the country cleaved for long
And petty agitators strove for praise.
Remember to forget your great grandfather,
Sometimes you worry me with traits like his,
Shun sentimental liberals, but rather
Uphold the law and give to charities.
1926
Home Song
Oh breezes blowing on the red hill-top
By tall fox-tails,
Where through dry twigs and leaves and grasses hop
The dull-brown quails!
Is there no magic floating in the air
To bring to me
A breath of you, when I am homesick here
Across the sea?
Oh black boys holding on the cricket ground
A penny race!
What other black boy frisking round and round,
Plays in my place?
When picnic days come with their yearly thrills
In warm December,
The boy in me romps with you in the hills—
Remember!
1926
Song of New York
Oh we have fled the world’s most splendid town,
Grey stone and iron rushing to the sky,
Firm-footed where the Hudson broadens down,
Fronting the world with steely majesty.
But we can not forget who have once seen
The sparkling eyes of New York from the bay,
Her naked body standing sheer and clean,
Pure grace like birches in the opening day.
We linger by a dim medieval wall
And hear a wrinkled guide repeat his story,
Now of a knight who, at a monarch’s call,
Beat back the foe and filled this spot with glory.
But I would hear instead the raucous sound
Of an old “elevated” overhead,
Be hurrying to the station Harlem-bound,
Than hear dead talk of things completely dead.
Oh often all alone on dim wet nights,
From the rear platform of a fast “El” train,
I watched the city’s undulating lights
And felt about my heart the antique pain
That man has always felt for beauty’s signs.
And often I was wildly moved to test
Myself against the city’s gleaming lines,
To feel their edges touch my bare brown breast!
I looked at Paris, like a lovely whore,
In jewelled dress attracting everyone,
And Berlin, like a raw and bleeding sore,
And London city shut out from the sun.
And vividly I realized New York,
A demon holding in his hand a whip,
Driving me through the cold straight streets to work
With a song frozen dead upon my lip.
Yet once you stand upon New Jersey’s soil
With a child’s attitude and turn your face
Toward the first citadel of modern toil,
A great rock jutting grandly out in space,
You’ll never forget that marvel of these years,
Around which wash the world’s increasing tides,
And, spurred by loves and hopes and singing fears,
Six millions scrambling up her steel-ribbed sides.
Abroad we shall be moved by memories warm
Of the great city graceful like a birch,
And find more mystery in her perfect form
Than in the spirit of an ancient church.
Deep in our thoughts her burning lines will flow,
Our veins pulsating with the poignant ache
That men have always felt who strangely go
Like gipsies through the world for beauty’s sake.
1926
Poppies and Poinsettias
Poinsettias in the high Jamaica hills,
Red leaf and green above the yellow soil,
And the unending drone of bees that fills
The air with music mingling with the toil
Of half nude peasants wielding pick and hoe,
Chantying at their labor in the sun:
“Sing Sally-O-Gal-O! Sing Sally-O!
Work’s more than man, but work must needs be done!”
I thought that no imaginable red
Could pour so pure, so magical a potion,
So lovely and so rich a hue could shed,
To hold the heart in tremulous emotion;
But in the soil of song and warm desires,
I have seen poppies, poppies, rioting—
Burning across the fields like prairie fires!
I have seen poppies in Provence in spring!
1926
My House
For this peculiar tint that paints my house
Peculiar in an alien atmosphere
Where other houses wear a kindred hue,
I have a stirring always very rare
And romance-making in my ardent blood,
That channels through my body like a flood.
I know the dark delight of being strange,
The penalty of difference in the crowd,
The loneliness of wisdom among fools,
Yet never have I felt but very proud,
Though I have suffered agonies of hell,
Of living in my own peculiar cell.
There is an exaltation of man’s life,
His hidden life, that he alone can feel.
The blended fires that heat his veins within,
Shaping his metals into finest steel,
Are elements from his own native earth,
That the wise gods bestowed on him at birth.
Oh each man’s mind contains an unknown realm
Walled in from other men however near,
And unimagined in their highest flights
Of comprehension or of vision clear;
A realm where he withdraws to contemplate
Infinity and his own finite state.
Thence he may sometimes catch a god-like glimpse
Of mysteries that seem beyond life’s bar;
Thence he may hurl his little shaft at heaven
And bring down accidentally a star,
And drink its foamy dust like sparkling wine
And echo accents of the laugh divine.
Then he may fall into a drunken sleep
And wake up in his same house painted blue
Or white or green or red or brown or black—
His house, his own, whatever be the hue.
But things for him will not be what they seem
To average men since he has dreamt his dream!
1926
America in Retrospect
Like vivid scenes stamped on a keen child’s mind,
Your gorgeous pageants entertain my view;
I see your great all-sweeping lights that blind
Your vision to the Shadow over you.
My thoughts of you are memories of a child,
A healthy child that soon forgets its hurt;
Wistful, I feel no hatred deep and wild,
For you made me a stoic introvert.
I fight with time but for a longer lease
Of those creative hours severe and stern,
Those hours in which I see my purpose plain,
That I may write in freedom and in peace
The accumulations of the years that burn,
White forge-like fires within my haunted brain.
1926
As flower dust is driven down the wind
To touch and quicken the green life of earth,
As birds spread wings and leave cold lands behind,
For regions of sweet warmth and singing mirth:
So shall thy thought be carried surely forth
To the remotest dwellings of mankind,
Reaching its inmost self to give new birth,
New strength, new purpose to man’s boundless mind.
The birds of time shall wing thee down the ways
Of man’s abode. Thy progress will be keen
Against the heavy mist of stormy days,
As ever progress through the years has been.
Even as strong-winged messengers are seen,
In these amazing times with fine amaze,
Threading the tides of space that roll between
The earth and heavens that ever hold man’s gaze.
The nations will be stricken at thy word,
And grand old prejudices crumble down,
That ancient pride in warring breasts has stirred.
The noblest men shall work for any renown.
Thy truest heralds do not fear the frown
Of legioned bigots leagued by fear and spurred
To crush thy truth, but more the shouting clown,
The standard-flocking of the sheeplike herd.
1928
[We are out in the field, the vast wide-open field]
We are out in the field, the vast wide-open field,
Thundering through from city to city
Where factories grow like jungle trees
Yielding new harvests for the world.
Through Johnstown glowing like a world aflame,
And Pittsburgh, Negro-black, brooding in iron smoke,
Philly’s Fifteenth street of wenches, speakeasies, and cops.
Out in the field, new fields of life
Where machines spin flowers like tropic trees
And coal and steel are blazing suns—
And darkly we wonder, night-wrapped in the light.
circa 1931
For a Leader
You are a torchlight of humanity,
A flame of Justice burning bright, alone,
Over the miseries of mortality,
Where human hearts are dead and turned to stone.
You are that uttermost crusading part,
The trumpet and the thunder and the storm,
A nerve pulsating of the eternal Heart,
That makes the miracle of the human form.
Let me be slave to all experience,
The beautiful, the utter and the strange,
For you the path of high magnificence
Climbing beyond the cloud-topped mountain range.
For you the incandescent fire of duty,
Your life consuming like a holocaust,
For me the world of passion, joy and beauty,
That makes me lover and iconoclast.
Oh take my songs and all the love they breathe
As symbols of my feelings incomplete,
Fashioned into a variegated wreathe—
A poet’s homage for your marching feet.
And as you go alone and single-willed,
Among them you may find a simple flower,
Whose perfume underneath your footsteps spilled,
May reach your senses in a lonely hour.
1934
The Years Between
I have returned, but you will never find,
All the familiar things of me intact,
I am like a classic that a modern mind
Has cut and altered to improve the act.
Now many passions agitate my heart,
For storms have swept the currents of my blood:
The years between have done their cyclic part—
The streams new courses found after the flood.
This mood that seems to you so passing strange,
This that you wrongly call a cynic smile,
Is nothing but a sequence of sea-change—
I have been running round a little while.
Though you may think me tired-minded, blank,
With nought to show since I wandered hence,
No outward token that I found and drank
Deep of the fountain of experience:
Yet I am richer now by many things,
Such treasures as I found along the way,
Those moments of my flight with golden wings,
Attached a moment to my feet of clay.
circa 1934
At the sign of the crows
Poised in the height of the sky,
The weltering south wind blows
And the hail-winging rain is nigh.
Over Mochos’ dark-greeny brow,
The white cloud turns soon to gray
And the gray turns dark-darker now—
Spreading black towards Run-a-way Bay.
Now it strikes the hot ground,
Breaking out in singular rills,
Hark! the rivers dark sound
In the hills, far away, in the hills!
circa 1934
Dreams
They are not bountiful now as before
More often they are horrible nightmares,
So many have been murdered in the roar
And bloody terror of the marring years.
Oh for the higher power, the inner light,
To see and hold a while a little one,
They torture me, flitting across my night,
I hear, I see, I touch them! They are gone!
Oh I have even drugged myself to dream
Of dear dead things, trembling with hope to capture
The sunlit ripples laughing on the stream
That bathed my boyhood days in foamy rapture.
circa 1934
Where once you worked and dwelt,
Perplexed by doubts and fears,
Unloved by those you felt
Should most love through the years,
Your monument remains—
Unreared of mortal hands,
Compensating your pains—
The legend of a land.
I clearly see you now—
Unshadowed of pain or ill,
Your calm benignant brow—
Lone but more lovely still
Beyond the life-long gloom
Of living you have won,
Above your nameless tomb,
A flame, a world, a sun.
circa 1934
Two Songs of Morocco
I
Startling like sudden fires sapping sedges,
Upon the desolate plain along the sea,
The yellow daisies strike out everywhere,
With flaming gaiety across the land.
And all the wistful countryside is changed
From gray into a golden singing choir,
And fresh sensations riot in the blood of life,
Stirring to action every living thing.
A ripened passion tints the women’s keening,
And of the barren olive trees the birds
Have made a sanctuary and from the creek,
The fishes leap up like tumblers in the air.
The burros lift their tails with blatant braying,
And dogs abuse the freedom of the road,
Amusing children innocent of shame,
While decent people pass with eyes averted.
Oh daisies making with the sea-washed breeze,
Brief songs of gold between a flash of life,
Attune to the rejuvenated land,
Bending my mind like a bow of melody.
II
Open your eyes and let me find again
Their light like a wet dawn by the sun surprised,
Gleaming desire for one rare moment’s joy.
Open your mouth and drink the eager wine,
Fermented strongly in its native cup,
And let it darkly flow along your veins,
And fill their cells intoxicating you,
Until your body, becoming an instrument
Of melody within the womb of Time,
Is like a fever hot with ecstasy,
Or like a brown bird beautiful to feel,
Or like wild honey come from wandering bees.
circa early–mid-1930S
A Song of Birth
Out of the vibrant body comes a song,
Uncovered like a jewel from the earth,
Out of uncharted realm of shadow and light,
Is flashed the tidings of another birth.
The watchers’ eyes are scintillant like stars,
God’s gifts are shining in the dismal night,
Where forms are blurred and melted in the mist
And sounds have precious qualities of light.
The physical and psychic strike accord
And touch the hidden core of secret things,
Where muted harmonies invite the soul
And the spirit speeds the senses’ flight on wings.
Under this obscure layer of deeper urge
Are gestant even greater than they seem
Inventive particles of the intellect
That shape the purpose of the eternal dream.
circa mid-1930S