to move the reader/hearer through contradictory feelings: delight with the visual splendor of the scene (banners blooming and “transcendent dyes” in “the golden air”) and awe or apprehension at the human forms that are here collected (“Bull-necked convicts,” “Loons with trumpets”). The diction suggests salvation (“bloomed with glory,” “transcendent,” “upward thro’ the golden air”) while the subjects are clearly fallen, and likely to remain so.

The poem almost halts, therefore, caught by this paradox of evangelistic passion in fallen men, in the opening accounts of the third stanza with its three slow beats: “Booth died blind. . . .” Lindsay picks up the rhythm with uncharacteristic iambs, such as “and still by faith he trod,” thus metrically emphasizing the miracle—dying blind but walking on. Lindsay hides the actual moment of transition here, as he does when the “blear review” is “in an instant” made new. In the middle of the stanza, with no italicized directions for music, Lindsay seems to lose the moment of salvation, and emphasizes instead the continuation of the parade of the purified host as it accompanies Booth to heaven.

Lindsay balances the familiar with the mystical perfectly. The parade of deadbeats playing musical instruments as they circle the town square becomes Booth’s contribution to his world of slum victims, a metaphoric representation of his collected good works, and a fantastic vision of the heavenly scene.

It is easy to see that the italicized passages of advice (“Sweet flute music”) are meant to invite the reader/hearer to change attitude, to prepare for a new meter, to modulate tone. Lindsay’s stage directions are meant to aid readers, not to stage shows or revise the verse. Lindsay structured his verse with care, setting lines on the page in groups indented or flush, with headnotes or numerical demarcation, always trying to slow the reader’s headlong rush through a poem.

“The Gospel of Beauty”

Much more sober and conventional but no less successful is the trio of poems united under the title “The Gospel of Beauty.” Lindsay sang the sections of this poem on his walking tours, and it is not hard to imagine the farmers of the plains listening with some pleasure to this celebration of their past and future. Once again, Lindsay’s characteristic concerns emerge from the lines, although there is little of the jazzy movement of the Booth poem in these thoughtful stanzas. “The Proud Farmer” (the title of the first segment) was Lindsay’s mother’s father, whose town, church, fields, and cemetery he knew well. The poet sees the heroic accomplishments of the rural life and the failure of the town to grow and prosper according to his grandfather’s design: “They sleep with him beneath the ragged grass . . ./ The village withers, by his voice unstirred.” The poet, “a sturdy grandchild,” is empowered by the meditation, this time admiring the characteristic American pioneer hero, the man who worked by day, read by night, preached the word, and sired a family to spread to the ends of the earth. Frazee, like Booth, was a hero, capable of converting and saving, and Lindsay feels his inheritance and expresses it in the run-ons of the last stanza. The inversions (“furtive souls and tame”) and archaisms (“he preached and plowed and wrought”) are not meant to ape the formal diction of poetic recollection; they are gestures of respect to a man of an earlier age, whose language was formed by biblical study.

The second section, “The Illinois Village,” reminds the reader of Lindsay’s preoccupation with Springfield as a holy and aesthetically charged place. The Golden Book of Springfield (1920) and The Village Magazine (pb. 1910, 1920, 1925, which he published several times at his own expense) were documents of his vision of Springfield as a site for political and spiritual rebirth, a new American life to start in the fields of Illinois. The three parts of “The Gospel of Beauty” move from one man on the land, to a village with promise, to a visionary city of the ideal future. “The Illinois Village” is Springfield in its youth, with the “village church by night” the image of “Spirit-power.” Commerce is de-emphasized in favor of artful decoration (“fountain-frieze” and painters and poets); the church is the moral and cultural center. Lindsay’s image of the church in moonlight and veiled by trees at dusty noon again places the fact between mere observation and fantasy, like the courthouse in “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”: “The trees that watch at dusty noon/ Breaking its sharpest lines, veil not/ The whiteness it reflects from God.”

“On the Building of Springfield” closes the work, its prophetic tone sharply in contrast to the meditative observations of the first two sections. Lindsay’s dream here is like that of any booster of an “All-American city”; he wishes his city to claim its place with Athens, Oxford, and Florence. But his terms and rhythms are unique and defy casual description. “The Proud Farmer” saw the house of God and the farm to be one; in “The Illinois Village,” the church organizes a square of town land, wreathed by trees; now a city is laid out in aisles, not streets, “where Music grows and Beauty is unchained.” The renaissance of Springfield is larger than a religious conversion or a chamber of commerce scheme; it demands aesthetic appreciation, a vision beyond the practical payoff. Lindsay sees the danger of boosterism and calls Springfield “Ninevah” and “Babylon” unless it heeds his call, the proud farmer’s heritage. Nature returns to assert its power when “Maple, Elm and Oak” are capitalized to suggest both the trees and the streets (as they are named in Springfield and almost every other American town); the trees again are the images of germinating genius in a town that tends to ignore the power of its own symbols. “Attics” are places to store rummage, not “sacred tears,” as Attics of Athens might have shed. The curious choice of the verb form in the repeated line (“A city is not builded in a day.”) reminds the reader/hearer of the process of the action, not its completeness: The open end of the trochee suggests both the incompleteness of the building and the hope for more.

“The Chinese Nightingale”

Thus Lindsay continues to combine vision and fact, myth and reality, all set in a form whose sound and meter supports and explains the message. This pattern is still evident, on a larger scale, in “The Chinese Nightingale,” a poem with its roots in the great tradition of nightingale poetry (Ovid, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats) and in the fairy tale (Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the bird and the emperor). Typically, Lindsay starts with a metrical and literary joke: The “How, how,” of Chang is the musical salutation in Chinese that the reader/hearer understands only in English. Lindsay’s sister and brother-in-law in China provided accurate images and diction for this poem. The question in reply to “How?” reminds the reader/hearer of William Wordsworth’s silly questions to the leech gatherer, but instead of a lament over lost greatness and present drudgery, the artful objects that surround Chang conjure up the beauty of a civilization gone, like Yeats’s piece of lapis lazuli. The nightingale, the joss, and the lady all sing with appropriate imagery and rhythm, to create the tapestry of sound that makes up the poem. The introduction of the lady’s song, for example, is effected with a couplet of lifting iambs, ending with a double-rhyme that has an unaccented final syllable, a feminine ending: (“aflower . . . bower”), while Chang is solid in iambs at the lines’ ends (his “countenance carved of stone/ ironed and ironed, all alone”). The living figure petrifies as the icons come alive: Keats would have approved, and Yeats did. The repetitions in the lady’s song are mesmerizing, with their alterations (“bright bronze breast” and “bronze-brown wing”) suggesting her accuracy, an accuracy that deteriorates in Chang’s responses to short-line generalizations and the vision of his San Francisco world. The Chinese laundryman is, like Keats, called back to his sole self after the nightingale’s voice is stilled, but his memory of the dialogue between lady and joss whispers, hinting at evocative details, the remains of inspiration.

The tones of the song are distinct: The nightingale is the medium, the muse, whose brief invitation and occasional punctuation of the tale are done with almost nonsensical repetition. The lady sings gently, with fewer explosive consonants and more iambs at line starts, dotting her lines with more anapestic feet (“I had a silvery name”) than the “great gray joss” whose tone is more belligerent and stylized:

Hear the howl of the silver seas,Hear the thunder.Hear the gongs of holy ChinaHow the waves and tunes combinein a rhythmic clashing wonder, . . .

A comparison of the speaking voices here with Yeats’s later “Byzantium” poems will reveal how many of the images are shared, and how differently the poems sound. Lindsay’s details are, literally, taken from the laundryman’s shelf, as Yeats’s stone in “Lapis Lazuli” was from his own desk, but the integrity of the speaking voices and the metrical effects are pure Lindsay.

Hopes unrealized

Whether Lindsay impersonates a joss or a calliope, or celebrates heroes like Pocahontas, John Peter Altgeld, Bryan, or Lincoln, the theme is frequently one of measured loss, hopes unrealized, populist dreams evaporating, death before accomplishment. In this regard, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” and “The Daniel Jazz” form a jolly retelling of a familiar tale. The “Kallyope” runs out of steam and will not, finally, convert the proud, but it has insisted on the equation of “the gutter dream” and “the golden dream.” The senseless notes that it sounds at the poem’s close are invitations to enjoy pure body rhythm, which cannot succeed on the page or with the ear. Lindsay was fascinated by the loss of the dream and the bittersweet recollections of the promise once imagined. From “The Last Song of Lucifer,” which he worked on in college, to “The Flower-Fed Buffaloes,” published in Going-to-the-Stars in 1926, Lindsay seems to understand and accept the cycle of creation and destruction, hope and despair. This last poem, fifteen short lines, perfectly embodies the cycle in its music and diction.

“The Flower-Fed Buffaloes”

“The Flower-Fed Buffaloes” opens with the title’s descriptive phrase, evoking the perfect pastoral, then quickly turns to the song of the locomotive in the third line. Like Henry David Thoreau, Lindsay did not see the railroad as an evil force; both poets allowed their trains to sing. Still, the flowers that sustained the buffalo “lie low” under the ties, just as the “perfumed grass” gives way to the wheat. Although flowers and grass have been replaced by railroad tracks and wheat farms, the spring “still is sweet”; Lindsay is not cheaply nostalgic or willing to falsify his experience. Nevertheless, something is gone, not just the buffalo, but the tribes that fed on the species. Lindsay surprises the reader/hearer with the intrusion of the Blackfeet and the Pawnees “lying low, lying low.”

The savagery of the past age is captured in the diction describing the buffaloes’ behavior (“They gore . . . they bellow . . . they trundle . . .”) and the reader suddenly glimpses the vigor and violence of that age. Perfect pastoral? Not at all, but assuredly gone. The sibilant s’s the aspirate f’s and wh’s, and the lingering l’s create a mood that the bellowing and goring only briefly interrupt, for the spring is sweet, and the wheels of the harvesting machines and the railroad cars sweep through the prairie contentedly. Lindsay’s point is to note the transition and loss and savor the memory, but not to hope for restoration.

Legacy

Lindsay was an optimist, aware of history as creator as well as destroyer. His poetry urges the reader/hearer to read and hear: to know how we sound, where we came from, and “what to make of a diminished thing,” that is, our future. When Frost used that phrase in “Oven Bird,” he preceded it with “the highway dust is over all”; Frost, too, had “tramped” the American countryside in isolation and even despair. Frost and Lindsay represent different views of American culture, Frost so subtle and indirect, Lindsay so brassy; Frost so New England, Lindsay so plain; Frost so academically ironic, Lindsay so insistently proletarian. Lindsay exercised his power by singing, Frost be reflecting, but the two believed in a moral life, in which the poet’s power to distinguish between what appears to be and what is, was supremely important.