Vachel Lindsay

“ The midnight made grand with a red-god charge,
A red-god show,
A red-god show,
"A-la-la, a-la-la, a-la-la, a-la-la."
With bodies like bronze, and terrible eyes
Came the rank and the file, with catamount cries,
Gibbering, yipping, with hollow-skull clacks,
Riding white bronchos with skeleton backs,
Scalp-hunters, beaded and spangled and bad,
Naked and lustful and foaming and mad,
Flashing primeval demoniac scorn,
Blood-thirst and pomp amid darkness reborn,
Power and glory that sleep in the grass
While the winds and the snows and the great rains pass. ”

“ I ENTER INTO THE NEW SPRINGFIELD OF 2018. I AM SNUBBED BY AVANEL, SHE RELENTS, SHOWING ME MANY PANORAMAS OF NEW SPRINGFIELD. WE CONFESS TO HAVING THE SAME DREAM OF DEVIL’S GOLD. But it is not after the noble manner of these others that I enter at last into the vision of 2018.
There is deep darkness, and time passing by without end, and shade. There is the fear of the moles that will not leave me alone, who make nests of alien dust, beneath my ribs. And my bones crumble through the century, like last year’s autumn leaves. ”

“ We might a great soul's sins forgive him then.
But must the Senator from Illinois
Be vindicated by fat kings of gold?
And must he be belauded by the smirched,
The sleek, uncanny chiefs in lies grown old?
Be warned, O wanton ones, who shielded him—
Black wrath awaits. You all shall eat the dust.
You dare not say: "To-morrow will bring peace;
Let us make merry, and go forth in lust."
What will you trading frogs do on a day
When Armageddon thunders thro' the land;
When each sad patriot rises, mad with shame,
His ballot or his musket in his hand? ”

“ It is one of the few deaths in moving pictures that have given me the sense that I was watching a tragedy. Most of them affect one, if they have any effect, like exhibits in an art gallery, as does Josef Israels' oil painting, Alone in the World. We admire the technique, and as for emotion, we feel the picturesqueness only. But here the church procession, the robes, the candles, the vaulting overhead, the whole visualized cathedral mood has the power over the reverent eye it has in life, and a touch more.
It is not a private citizen who is struck down. ”

“ The spice-tree spreads And its boughs come down Shadowing village and farm and town. And none can see But the pure of heart The great green leaves And the boughs descending, And hear the song that is never ending. The deep roots whisper, The branches say:— "Love to-morrow, And love to-day, And till Heaven's day, And till Heaven's day." The moon is a bird's nest in its branches, The moon is hung in its topmost spaces. And there, to-night, two doves play house While lovers watch with uplifted faces. Two doves go home To their nest, the moon. ”

“ A traveller was more shut from the horizon than in the slums of Chicago. The road climbed no summits. It writhed like a snake. And there were snakes sunning themselves on every other cross-log. And there was never a flower to be seen.
An old woman, kindly enough, gave this beggar a noon-meal for the asking, but the landscape had struck into me so I almost feared to eat the bread. For this fear I sternly blamed my perverse imagination. Refreshed in body only, I crept like a fascinated fly, dragged by occult force toward a spider’s den. ”

“ The places where the armies of wheat-sheaves are marshalled are magic places, despite their sweat and dust. There is nothing small in the panorama. All the lines of the scene are epic. The binder-twine is invisible, and has not altered the eternal classic form of the sheaf. There is a noble dignity and ease in the motion of a new reaper on a level field. A sturdy Mennonite devotee marching with a great bundle of wheat under each arm and reaching for a third makes a picture indeed, an essay on sunshine beyond the brush of any impressionist. ”

“ A man may hardly expect to live again beyond the life of that little earth that surrounds his bones, and feeds the roots of the nearest tree. He may, perhaps give life through the leaves of that tree to the locust in the bark, or to the squirrel in the branches, but your song came past my grave like a fairy’s breath, and my ashes are again man or fire or weed or living thorns, or what you will them to be. If you will have nothing of a man, why give life to his dust?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them. ”

“ Chanting the death of the kingdoms of wrath.
You wrought until night with us all.
The fierce brutes fawned at your call,
Then slipped to their lairs, song-chained.
And thus you sang sweetly, and reigned:
"Immortal is the inner peace, free to beasts and men.
Beginning in the darkness, the mystery will conquer,
And now it comforts every heart that seeks for love again.
And now the mammoth bows the knee,
We hew down every Tiger Tree,
We send each tiger bound in love and glory to his den,
Bound in love ... and wisdom ... and glory, ... to his den." ”

“ I do not advocate for the photoplay the mood of the Venus of Milo. But let us turn to that sister of hers, the great Victory of Samothrace, that spreads her wings at the head of the steps of the Louvre, and in many an art gallery beside. When you are appraising a new film, ask yourself: "Is this motion as rapid, as godlike, as the sweep of the wings of the Samothracian?" Let her be the touchstone of the Action Drama, for nothing can be more swift than the winged Gods, nothing can be more powerful than the oncoming of the immortals. ”

“ A city is not builded in a day:
Our little town cannot complete her soul
Till countless generations pass away.
Now let each child be joined as to a church
To her perpetual hopes, each man ordained:
Let every street be made a reverent aisle
Where Music grows and Beauty is unchained.
Let Science and Machinery and Trade
Be slaves of her, and make her all in all,
Building against our blatant, restless time
An unseen, skilful, medieval wall.
Let every citizen be rich toward God.
Let Christ the beggar, teach divinity.
Let no man rule who holds his money dear. ”

“ Love is not velvet, not all of it velvet, Not all of it banners, not gold-leaf alone. 'Tis stern as the ages and old as Religion. With Patience its watchword, and Law for its throne.
The Perfect Marriage I I hate this yoke; for the world's sake here put it on: Knowing 'twill weigh as much on you till life is gone. Knowing you love your freedom dear, as I love mine— Knowing that love unchained has been our life's great wine: Our one great wine (yet spent too soon, and serving none; Of the two cups free love at last the deadly one) . ”

“ At his simple forge he hammers out those wonderful swords in plain sight of the passer-by or the detective from Europe. They cannot grasp the secret. He named his gift to the world, “The Avanel Blade.” It is waspish and supple, all-conquering in body and soul. Sideways it can be wound like watch spring steel, or even a coil of narrow ribbon. Edgewise it can cut more human flesh and bone than the heavy guillotine, it can cut straight through an iron or granite block of any thickness, as though it were cutting snow. In its standard form it is longer than the longest cavalry sword. ”

“ I wish I could start a sturdy sect like old Menno Simonis did. They should dress as these have done, and be as stubborn and rigid in their discipline. They should farm as these have done, but on reaching the point where the Mennonite buys the automobile, that money and energy should go into the making of cross-roads palaces for the people, golden as the harvest field, and disciplined well-parked villages, good as a psalm, and cities fair as a Mennonite lady in her prayer-covering, delicate and noble as Athens the unforgotten, the divine. ”

“ The crowds should be like the tossing waves of the Ionic Sea and Athena like the white ship upon the waves. The audiences in the tragedies should be shown like wheat-fields on the hill-sides, always stately yet blown by the wind, and Athena the one sower and reaper. Crowds should descend the steps of the Acropolis, nymphs and fauns and Olympians, carved as it were from the marble, yet flowing like a white cataract down into the town, bearing with them Athena, their soul. All this in the Photoplay of Pericles. ”

“ II We grant our meetings will be tame, not honey-sweet No longer turning to the tryst with flying feet. We know the toil that now must come will spoil the bloom And tenderness of passion's touch, and in its room Will come tame habit, deadly calm, sorrow and gloom. Oh, how the battle scars the best who enter life! Each soldier comes out blind or lame from the black strife. Mad or diseased or damned of soul the best may come— It matters not how merrily now rolls the drum, The fife shrills high, the horn sings loud, till no steps lag— And all adore that silken flame, Desire's great flag. ”

“ There is a babble and a roar that is the beating of the vast heart of Springfield. Its rhythm goes into our footfalls every instant.
It is late, and Avanel insists on going on, in the intoxication of weariness, and will not let me take her to her house on Mulberry Boulevard. She leads me into the very thick of the great forest of Sunset Towers again, now “midnight towers,” she says to me, with her face flushed to a deep crimson from utter weariness, and her eyes heavy with the desire for sleep, and her determined little feet still dancing nervously on. ”

“ It is a deeper matter than you think. Listen to the laughter of the farmer's children. Know that not all the earth is a-weeping. Know that so long as there is black soil deep on the prairie, so long as grass will grow on it, we have a vast green haven.
The roots of some of our trees are still in the earth. Our mountains need not to be moved from their places. Wherever there is tillable land, there is a budding and blooming of old-fashioned Americanism, which the farmer is making splendid for us against the better day. ”

“ And the highest type of Action Picture romance is not attained by having Juliet triumph over the motorcycle handicap. It is not achieved by weaving in a Sherlock Holmes plot. Action Picture romance comes when each hurdle is a tableau, when there is indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each one of these swift glimpses: when it is a race, but with a proper and golden-linked grace from action to action, and the goal is the most beautiful glimpse in the whole reel. ”