Classic Poem

I

Babbitt, your tribe is passing away.
This is the end of your infamous day.
The Virginians are coming again.
With your neat little safety-vault boxes,
With your faces like geese and foxes,
You
Short-legged, short-armed, short-minded men,
Your short-sighted days are over,
Your habits of strutting through clover,

Your movie-thugs, killing off souls and dreams,
Your magazines, drying up healing streams,
Your newspapers, blasting truth and splendor,
Your shysters, ruining progress and glory,

Babbitt, your story is passing away.
The Virginians are coming again.

All set for the victory, calling the raid
I see them, the next generation,
Gentlemen, hard-riding, long-legged men,
With horse-whip, dog-whip, gauntlet and braid,
Mutineers, musketeers,
In command
Unafraid:

Great-grandsons of tidewater, and the bark-cabins,
Bards of the Blue-ridge, in buckskin and boots,
Up from the proudest war-path we have known
The Virginians are coming again.
The sons of ward-heelers
Threw out the ward-heelers,
The sons of bartenders
Threw out the bartenders,
And made our streets trick-boxes all in a day,
Kicked out the old pests in a virtuous way.
The new tribe sold kerosene, gasoline, paraffine.
Babbitt sold Judas, Babbitt sold Christ,
Babbitt sold everything under the sun.
The Moon-Proud consider a trader a hog.
The Moon-Proud are coming again.

Bartenders were gnomes,
Foreigners, tyrants, hairy babboons.
But you are no better with saxophone tunes.
Phonograph tunes, radio tunes,
Water-power tunes, gasoline tunes, dynamo tunes,
And pitiful souls like your pitiful tunes,
And crawling old insolence blocking the road,
So, Babbitt, your racket is passing away.
Your sons will be changelings, and burn down your world.
Fire-eaters, troubadours, conquistadors.
Your sons will be born, refusing your load,
Thin skinned scholars, hard riding men,
Poets unharnessed, the moon their abode,
With the statesmen's code, the gentlemen's code,
With Jefferson's code, Washington's code,
With Powhatan's code!
From your own loins, for your fearful defeat
The Virginians are coming again.

II

Our first Virginians were peasants' children,
But the Power of Powhatan reddened their blood,
Up from the sod came splendor and flood.
Eating the maize made them more than men,
Potomac fountains made gods of men.

III

In your tottering age, not so long from you now,
The terror will blast, the armies will whirl,
Cavalier boy beside cavalier girl!
In the glory of pride, not the pride of the rich,
In the glory of statesmanship, not of the ditch.
The old grand manner, lost no longer:

Exquisite art born with heart-bleeding song
Will make you die horribly raving at wrong.
You will not know your sons who are true to this soil;

For Babbitt could never count much beyond ten,
For Babbitt could never quite comprehend men
You will die in your shame, understanding not day.

Out of your loins, to your utmost confusion
The Virginians are coming again.

Do you think boys and girls that I pass on the street,
More strong than their fathers, more fair than their fathers,
More clean than their fathers, more wild than their fathers,
More in love than their fathers, deep in thought not their fathers
Are meat for your schemes diabolically neat?

Do you think that all youth is but grist to your mill
And what you dare plan for them, boys will fulfill?
The next generation is free. You are gone,
Out of your loins, to your utmost confusion
The Virginians are coming again.

IV

Rouse the reader to read it right,
Find a good hill by the full-moon light,
Gather the boys and chant all night: —
" The Virginians are coming again. "

Put in rhetoric, whisper and hint,
Put in shadow, murmur and glint;
Jingle and jangle this song like a spur.
Sweep over each tottering bridge with a whirr,
Clearer and faster up main street and pike
Till sparks flare up from the flints that strike.

Leap metrical ditches with bridle let loose.
This song is a war, with an iron-shod use.

Let no musician, with blotter and pad
Scribble his pot-hooks to make the song sad.
Find
Your own rhythms
When Robert E. Lee
Gallops once more to the plain from the sea.
Give the rebel yell every river they gain.

Hear Lee's light cavalry rhyme with rain.
In the star-proud, natural fury of men
The Virginians are coming again.