Classic Poem

I looked from my window at the great lake,
And Shakespeare, and Keats, and Whitman stood beside my chair
And pointed out to me things I might not have seen.
They bade me observe the feather lights lying upon the lake surface,
The blue enlarging upon a greater blue of the flat, approaching water,
The crispness of its line against the shore.
But the trains ran beneath my window, puffing and grinding,
And from the circus tents beyond the railroad tracks
Came the incessant, teasing bleat of the heard notes of a brass band.
" Mr. Shakespeare, " I urged, " be so kind as to repeat what you just said,
I did not quite hear it.
And, Mr. Keats, say that once again, if you please, I wish to lose nothing. "
Only Walt Whitman kept on speaking,
Rolling out words which swept through the noise like a heavy moon through clouds,
And his stretched arm pointed to the lake, cutting the tent in two, blotting out the middle flag.

So it went on all day,
And the poets withdrew, baffled,
And the circus tent swelled to a prodigious size and hung before me as all America.
And the sorrow of jungle animals wasting themselves upon sawdust entered my heart,
And the glory and grief of the trapeze artists and their useless perfection
Rasped my nerves with the prick of hail.
So it was all day.
And all day I watched and saw my country swallowed up by the huge tent,
Far from trees, sweltering in a hot dust,
Crying its delight cheaply and violently through the voices of peanut-men and clowns.

Night came, and the band droned on and bright lights glared in the tents.
I had ceased to think. I stared out of the window and beat time to the band on the arm of my chair.
Beyond the tent, the great lake crouched in darkness, waiting.
I thought it waited to say a word to the caged, jungle animals,
To the trapeze artists who had cheated death another day.
I too waited until the tent lights went out,
And the lighthouses shone, red and white, in even pulsations,
Half-way up my black window.
And Shakespeare, and Keats, and Whitman came back and watched the turning lights with me,
Silently we watched them half-way up the window.
Then an elephant trumpeted, dreaming of water and lush trees,
And a jackal, forgetting his cage, howled to the smell of the creeping water,
And I wrote a poem for the trapeze artists which they will never read,
And showed it to my companions, who only nodded,
For they were watching the turning lighthouse lanterns, revolving red and white — red and white — slowly, evenly, halfway up the window.