Classic Poem

Across the sea my country, my America,
Girt with steel, hard-glittering with power,
As a champion, with great voice trumpeting
High words, " For Liberty ... Democracy ... "

Deep within me something stirs, answers —
(My country, my America!)
As if alone in the high and empty night
She called me — my lost one, my first lover
I love no more, love no more, no more ...
The cloudy shadow of old tenderness,
Illusions of beautiful madness — many deaths
And easy immortality ...

1

By my free boyhood in the wide West
The powerfull sweet river, fish-wheels, log-rafts,
Ships from behind the sunset, Lascar-manned,
Chinatown, throbbing with mysterious gongs,
The blue thunderous Pacific, blaring sunsets,
Black smoking forests on surf-beaten headlands,
Lost beaches, camp-fires, wail of hunting cougars ...
By the rolling range, and the flat sun-smitten desert,
Night with coyotes yapping, domed with burst of stars,
The grey herd moving eastward, towering dust,
Ropes whistling in slow coils, hats flapping, yells ...
By miles of yellow wheat ripping in the Chinook,
Orchards forever endless, deep in blooming,
Green-golden orange-groves and snow-peaks looming over ...
By raw audacious cities sprung from nothing,
Brawling and bragging in their careless youth ...
I know thee, America!

Fisherman putting out from Astoria in the foggy dawn their double-bowed boats,
Lean cow-punchers jogging south from Burns, with faces burned leathery and silent,
Stringy old prospectors trudging behind reluctant pack-horses, across the Nevada alkali,
Hunters coming out of the brush at night-fall on the brink of the Lewis and Clark canyon,
Grunting as they slide off their fifty-pound packs and look around for a place to make camp,
Forest rangers standing on a bald peak and sweeping the wilderness for smoke,
Big-gloved brakeman walking the top of a swaying freight, spanner in hand, biting off a hunk of plug,
Lumbermen with spiked boots and timber-hood, riding the broken jam in white water,
Indians on the street-corner in Pocatello, pulling out chin-whiskers with a pair of tweezers and a pocket-mirror,
Or down on the Siuslaw, squatting behind their summer lodges listening to Caruso on a two-hundred dollar phonograph,
Loud-roaring Alaska miners, smashing looking-glasses, throwing the waiter a five-dollar gold-piece for a shot of whiskey and telling him to keep the change,
Keepers of dance-halls in construction-camps, barkeeps, prostitutes,
Bums riding the rods, wobblies singing their defiant songs, unafraid of death,
Card-sharps and real-estate agents, timber-kings, wheat-kings, cattle-kings ...
I know ye, Americans!

By my bright youth in golden Eastern towns ...
Harvard ... pain of growing, ecstasy of unfolding,
Thrill of books, thrill of friendship, hero-worship,
Intoxication of dancing, tempest of great music,
Squandering delight, first consciousness of power ...
Wild nights in Boston, battles with policemen,
Picking up girls, nights of lurid adventure ...
Winter swims at L street, breaking the ice
Just for the strong shock on a hard body ...
And the huge stadium heaving up its thousands
With cadenced roaring cheer or song tremendous
When Harvard scored on Yale ... By this, by this
I know thee, America!

By proud New York and its man-piled Matterhorns,
The hard blue sky overhead and the west wind blowing,
Steam-plumes waving from sun-glittering pinnacles,
And deep streets shaking to the million-river —
Manhattan, zoned with ships, the cruel
Youngest of all the world's great towns,
Thy bodice bright with many a jewel,
Imperially crowned with crowns ...

Who that hath known thee but shall burn
In exile till he come again
To do thy bitter will, O stern
Moon of the tides of men!

Soaring Fifth Avenue, Peacock Street, Street of banners
Ever-changing pageant of splendid courtesans,
Fantastic color, sheen of silks and silver, toy-dogs,
Procession of automobiles like jewel-boxes —

Traffic-cop majestical with lifted yellow hand —
Palaces, hotels gigantic, old men in club-windows,
Sweat-shops belching their dun armies at noon-time,
Parades, mile-waves of uniforms flowing up
Bands crashing, between the black still masses of people ...

Broadway, gashing the city like a lava-stream,
Crowned with shower of sparks, as a beaten fire,
Blazing theaters, brazen restaurants, smell of talc,
Movie mansions, hock-shops, imitation diamonds,
Chorus-girls making the rounds of the booking-agencies,
Music-factories-blatting from twenty-five pianos,
And all the hectic world of paint and shirt-front ...
Old Greenwich Village, citadel of amateurs,
Battle-ground of all adolescent Utopias,
Half sham-Bohemia, dear to uptown slummers,
Half sanctuary of the outcast and dissatisfied ...
Free fellowship of painters, sailors, poets,
Light women, Uranians, tramps and strike-leaders,
Actresses, models, people with aliases or nameless,
Sculptors who run elevators for a living,
Musicians who have to pound pianos in picture-houses...
Working, dissipating, most of them young, most of them poor,
Playing at art, playing at love, playing at rebellion,
In the enchanted borders of the impossible republic...

Mysteriously has word of it gone forth
To lonely cabins in the Virginia mountains,
Logging-camps in the Maine woods, desert ranches;
Farms lost in vastnesses of Dakota wheat...
Wherever young heart-hungry dreamers of splendor
Can find in all the hard immensity of America
No place to fashion beauty, no companion
To shameless talk of loveliness and love,
Here would they be, elbow on a wooden table at Polly's
Or, borrowing a fiver, over Burgandy at the Brevoort,
Arguing about Life, and Sex, and the Revolution...

The East Side, worlds within a world, chaos of nations,
Sink of the nomad races, last and wretchedest
Port of the westward Odyssey of mankind...
At dawn vomiting colossal flood of machine-fodder,
At evening sucking back with terrible harsh sound
To beast-like tenements, garish nichelodeons, gin-mills.
Kids hanging round the corner saloon, inhaling cheap cigarettes,
Leering at the short-skirted girls who two by two go giggling by,
Picking their way between crawling babies, over the filthy sidewalk...
Children at shrill daring games under the hoofs of truck-horses —
Gaunt women screaming at them and each other; in twanging foreign tongues —
Old men sitting on the crowded stoop in shirt-sleeves, smoking an evening pipe,
Glare of push-cart torches ringed with alien faces ...
In dim Rumanian wine-cellars I am not unwelcome,
Pulsing with hot rhythm of scornful gypsy fiddlers...
In Grand Street coffee-rooms, haunt of Yiddisn philosophers,
Novelists reading aloud a new chapter, collecting a dime from each auditor,
Playwrights dramatizing the newspaper headlines, poets dumb to deaf America...
Fenian saloons, with prominent green flag, and a framed bond of the Irish Republic over the bar,
Italian ristorantes, Chianti and spontaneous tenors,
Amenian kitchens hung with Oriental carpets from New Jersey,
Where hawk-faced men whisper over thick coffee fingering tesbiehs...
German bier-stuben, painted with fat mottoes ... French cafes, neat madame at the caisse,
Greek kaffeinias, chop-suey joints with contemptuous slant-eyes waiters...

Theatres, Italian marionettes gesticulating Tasso,
Flabby burlesque at Miner's ... Tomashevsky's Jewish coryphees,
Offenbach in Irving Place, winey snap and sparkle,
La Scala Opera Company in Otello at the Verdi —
Ragged costumes, toppling scenery, and voices glorious...
And the Sicilian Duse, glowing through Giovanitti! Tenebri Rossi
Like a volcanic daybreak over the Siberian tundra...

Well do I know the Russian brass-shops on Allen Street
The opium-stinking dens of the Cantonese lottery-men
And where the Syrians sell their cool grey water-jars...

Chathan Square, framed in monstrous kinema-signs and the saloons of the damned,
Bowery old-clothes men, stale and sand-floored drinking-rooms, spotted with all spittle,
Beef-steak John's, spoken of by sailors in the utter-most ports of earth,
Peter Cooper Square in the sick light of before-dawn
Heaped up with homeless men ... the ten-cent lodging-houses
Where shaking wrecks sit dully picking lice around the red-not stove...
Stuss-games in sinister back-rooms over on Avenue A,
Dingy law-offices in the shadow of the Tombs, shrines of unclean miracles,
The blasted twilight under the hysterical thunder of the East River bridges,
And South Street fragrant still with spices of long-vanished clipper-ships...
Dear and familiar and unforgettable is the city
As the face of my mother...

City Hall, never-still whirlpool of the seven millions,
Drowned in the crashing ebb and flow of Brooklyn Bridge,
Human cascades from the Elevated, and the Subway geysers spouting...
The humming newspaper-offices aglitter till the dawn,
Flocks of little newsboys like dusty sparrows
Splashing in the forbidden fountains...sleeping bums...
In the far-flung shadow of legnedary towers...
The Battery, sea-wind-cool, at the foot of the sky-scraper precipice,
And the sonorous great ships going by, bound for the ends of sea,
Squat hurtling ferries, barges stiff with box-cars, eagle-crested tugs;
Yellow spray leaping the sea-wall, hoarse gulls circling over,
And Liberty lifting gigantic, menacing, out of the strife of keels,
Behind it crouching Ellis Island, purgatory of freedom...

Exotic Negro-town, upper Amsterdam Avenue,
And its black sensuous easily-happy people, shunned of men
The Dark-town Follies, and Europe's ragtime orchestra...
Central Park, elegant motors purring along the drive,
Smart cavaliers, perambulators of the upper-classes,
Lovers on benches uneasily spooning, one eye out for the cops
And the gasping slums poured out hot summer nights to sleep on the meadows...
Harlem, New York second-hand and slightly cheaper,
Bronx, post-graduate ghetto, scabby growth of new tenements,
Vast green-glowing parks, and the frayed edge of the country...
Have I omitted you, truck-quaking West Street, dingy Death Avenue,
Gracious old Church of the Sea and Land, Inwood, tip of Mannattan,
The rag-shops of Minetta Lane, and the yelping swirl of the Broad Street Curb,
Macdougal Alley, gilded squalor of fashionable artists,
Coenties Slip, old sea-remembering notch at the back of down-town — ?

Nay, across the world, three thoudand miles away, without map or guide-book,
Ask me and I will describe them, and their people,
In all weathers, drunk or sober, by sun and moon...

I have watched the summer day come up from the top of a pier of the Williamsburgh Bridge,
I have slept in a basket of squid at the Fulton Street Market,
Talked about God with the old cockney woman who sells hot-dogs under the Elevated at South Ferry,
Listen to tales of dago dips in the family parlor of the Hell-hole,
And from the top gallery of the Metropolitan heard Didur sing " Boris Godounov " ...
I have shot craps with gangsters in the Gas House district,
And seen what happens to a green bull on San Juan Hill.
I can tell you where to hire a gunman to croak a squealor,
And where young girls are bought and sold, and how to get coke on 125th Street
And what men talk about behind Steve Brodie's, or in the private rooms of the Lafayette Baths...

Dear and familiar and ever-new to me is the city
As the body of my lover...
All sounds — harsh clatter of the Elevated, rumble of the subway,
Tapping of policemen's clubs on midnight pavements,
Hand-organs plaintive and monotonous, squawking motor-horns,
Gatling crepitation of airy riveters,
Muffled detonations deep down underground,
Flat bawling of newsboys, quick-clamoring ambulance gongs,
Deep nervous tooting from the evening harbor,
And the profound shuffling thunder of myriad feet.

All smells — smell of sample shoes, second-hand clothing,
Dutch bakeries, Sunday delicatessen, kosher cooking,
Smell of damp tons of newspapers along Park Row,
The Subway, smelling like the tomb of Rameses the Great,
The tired odor of infinite human dust-drug-stores,
And the sour slum stench of mean streets.

People — rock-eyed brokers gambling with Empires,
Swarthy insolent boot-blacks, cringing push-cart peddlers,
The white-capped wop flipping wheat-cakes in the window of Childs',
Sallow garment-workers coughing on a park-bench in the thin spring sun,
Dully watching the leaping fountain as they eat a handful of peanuts for lunch...
The steeple-jack swaying infinitesimal at the top of the Woolworth flag-pole,
Charity workers driving hard bargains for the degradation of the poor,
Worn-out snarling street-car conductors, sentimental prize fighters,
White wings scouring the roaring traffic-ways, foul-mouthed truck-drivers,
Spanish longshoremen heaving up freight-mountains, hollow-eyed silk workers,
Structural steel workers catching hot rivets on high-up spidery girders,
Sand-hogs in hissing air-locks under the North River, sweating subway muckers, hard-rock men blasting beneath Broadway,
Ward-leaders with uptilted cigars, planning mysterious underground battles for power,
Raucous soap-boxers in Union Square, preaching the everlasting crusade,
Pale half-fed cash-girls in department stores, gaunt children making paper-flowers in dim garrets,
Princess stenographers, and manicurists chewing gum with a queenly air,
Macs, whore-house madams, street-walkers, touts, bouncers, stool-pigeons...
All professions, races, temperaments, philosophies,
All history, all possibilities, all romance,
America...the world...!