America
1916
From the sea-coast, from the bleak ravines of the hills that lift their bare escarpments towards the sky that pours down pitiless threads of sunlight, whirls over chill clinging tentacles of rain, smashes hard buffets of huge wind, sifts fine quivering drifts of snow, thrashes with thunder and with hail, uncurls its great sodden flapping curtains before the gale — from the marshlands, from the banks of slow rivers, from the still brown plateaus, from the midst of steaming valleys, from the wide bays ringed with peaks — a thousand cities reek into the sky. Through a million vents the smell of cookery overflows. It rises upwards day and night in strange tragic black rows of smoke that glow and make the stars quiver, and dance and darken the sunlight.
Green billows of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet and fuse and intercross. Cattle string across in frightened procession; multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy fluffy clouds. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers or an antelope starts up or a sly half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their arms in circles aloft, crazy log cabins toppling into the marsh. On every side are symbols of man's desire made with his hands, hurried, glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks down and does not understand but pours over them its heat, and cold, and rain, and light, and lightning, always the same.
Immense machines are clamouring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. The wheels moan and groan and roar and waver and snap — and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles leaving grey trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle, the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory-shafts, the fleet masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their force is never spent or tired, or nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey gigantic scrawls amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all shoot backwards and forwards words that walk in the air, and perhaps not for long will the upper spaces be still and bare, but will soon be filled with racing lines of strong black-bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack. Red and black and yellow the earth takes on its coat of colours, from the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven over with interspersed entangled threads, of which the meaning is lost, from which the pattern is not yet freed.
Amid all this men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter, scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy masses out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen blocks of steel or marble over space; they saunter in some forgotten place; they yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow, pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of sombre dripping forest mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their pains. Grey hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then as if in mockery some coppery tower that seems as if it would split the sky with its majesty. They are a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some giant's body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creeps through them, pouring its breath out of the chimneys, scattering itself over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great vague inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And still the sky pours on it heat and rain and wind and light and lightning and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake and take its place in the world.
But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears, it seems to swell from out the earth; it emerges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer blows that split the core of earth asunder — the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher covering the sea with its tumult and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals upon earth's breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.
The centuries sit with hands upon their knees, wearing on weary foreheads the stamp of their destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn — but the being — the thing that will master all the ages — still refuses to be born. The great derricks, black and frozen lift their arms in mid-air; the locomotives hoot and mutter with despair; the shuttles clatter and clamour and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls while without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding in the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will not arrive — still it refuses at the very gates of life. America! — America! — blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth!
Spring, 1916
From the sea-coast, from the bleak ravines of the hills that lift their bare escarpments towards the sky that pours down pitiless threads of sunlight, whirls over chill clinging tentacles of rain, smashes hard buffets of huge wind, sifts fine quivering drifts of snow, thrashes with thunder and with hail, uncurls its great sodden flapping curtains before the gale — from the marshlands, from the banks of slow rivers, from the still brown plateaus, from the midst of steaming valleys, from the wide bays ringed with peaks — a thousand cities reek into the sky. Through a million vents the smell of cookery overflows. It rises upwards day and night in strange tragic black rows of smoke that glow and make the stars quiver, and dance and darken the sunlight.
Green billows of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet and fuse and intercross. Cattle string across in frightened procession; multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy fluffy clouds. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers or an antelope starts up or a sly half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their arms in circles aloft, crazy log cabins toppling into the marsh. On every side are symbols of man's desire made with his hands, hurried, glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks down and does not understand but pours over them its heat, and cold, and rain, and light, and lightning, always the same.
Immense machines are clamouring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. The wheels moan and groan and roar and waver and snap — and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles leaving grey trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle, the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory-shafts, the fleet masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their force is never spent or tired, or nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey gigantic scrawls amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all shoot backwards and forwards words that walk in the air, and perhaps not for long will the upper spaces be still and bare, but will soon be filled with racing lines of strong black-bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack. Red and black and yellow the earth takes on its coat of colours, from the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven over with interspersed entangled threads, of which the meaning is lost, from which the pattern is not yet freed.
Amid all this men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter, scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy masses out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen blocks of steel or marble over space; they saunter in some forgotten place; they yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow, pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of sombre dripping forest mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their pains. Grey hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then as if in mockery some coppery tower that seems as if it would split the sky with its majesty. They are a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some giant's body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creeps through them, pouring its breath out of the chimneys, scattering itself over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great vague inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And still the sky pours on it heat and rain and wind and light and lightning and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake and take its place in the world.
But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears, it seems to swell from out the earth; it emerges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer blows that split the core of earth asunder — the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher covering the sea with its tumult and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals upon earth's breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.
The centuries sit with hands upon their knees, wearing on weary foreheads the stamp of their destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn — but the being — the thing that will master all the ages — still refuses to be born. The great derricks, black and frozen lift their arms in mid-air; the locomotives hoot and mutter with despair; the shuttles clatter and clamour and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls while without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding in the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will not arrive — still it refuses at the very gates of life. America! — America! — blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth!
Spring, 1916
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