Let us start our nation over again, Vachel Lindsay

from Roosevelt

(written for the Illinois State Teachers' Association, printed as a broadside, and read, and distributed the same day: April 4, 1924)  

Who elected these pole-cats rulers of men?

Let us start a gay nation over again!

Let us start a circus as honest as Barnum's,

With three clean rings, and plenty to see,

Athletes, not snakes, on the trapeze tree.

 

Let us start our nation over again,

In the names of legitimate rulers of men,

In the names of the greatest, and the famous dead:--

Yes, the name of the glittering cinnamon bear,

Never so wicked or sore in the head,

But he fed the children honey and bread.

He taught them the names of the great and the dead,

From the Irish sagas, to Carson and Boone.

 

He loved the villages, Deadwood, Medora,

Tuskeegee and Tuscarora,

Mexicali and Farmington,

Calexico and Bennington,

Arlington and Lexington,

Oyster Bay, Mount Vernon.

 

He loved the cities Denver, Manhattan,

And the wide, great spaces

From the Amazon to Saskatoon--

He loved the heroes, Columbus, Whitman, Lincoln--

He loved the heroes! He loved George Washington!--

Who was honest as youth and white as the moon.

 

--Vachel Lindsay

 

I was looking for something suitable for my mood (I've read nothing but news sites these last two days) and hoped that Lindsay would provide. He did. 

 

Roosevelt, that 'glittering cinnamon bear', is Teddy, who died in 1919. Lindsay says in a note to the poem, he'd read about the 'behavior of two middle western governors' and this poem was the result. I couldn't figure out who the governors were or what exactly they'd done, though...

 

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet born in Springfield, Illinois, who died there as well, though he managed to walk across a huge chunk of America in the interim. He's featured on the blog a couple of times before. As a child of Illinois, I've known about him forever. This is about a quarter of the poem from near the end.

 

Political poetry is hard. Too often the political issues prove passing, but nevertheless the poetry is sacrificed to them. Not all of Lindsay's poetry is political, but a lot of it is, and he succeeds pretty often.

 

Let us start our nation over again.