Toward the Gulf | Page 3

and instructed me in my analysis. Standing by you confirmed or
corrected my sculpturing of the clay taken out of the soil from which
we both came. You did this with an eye familiar with the secrets of the
last twenty years, familiar also with the relation of those years to the
time which preceded and bore them.
So it is, that not only because I could not dedicate Spoon River to you,
but for the larger reasons indicated, am I impelled to do you whatever
honor there may be in taking your name for this book. By this outline
confession, sometime perhaps to be filled in, do I make known what
your relation is to these interpretations of mine resulting from a spirit,
life, thought, environment which have similarly come to us and have
similarly affected us.
I call this book "Toward the Gulf," a title importing a continuation of
the attempts of Spoon River and The Great Valley to mirror the age and
the country in which we live. It does not matter which one of these
books carries your name and makes these acknowledgments; so far,
anyway, as the opportunity is concerned for expressing my appreciation
of your friendship and the great esteem and affectionate interest in
which I hold you.
EDGAR LEE MASTERS.
The following poems were first printed in the publications indicated:
Toward the Gulf, The Lake Boats, The Loom, Tomorrow is my

Birthday, Dear Old Dick, The Letter, My Light with Yours, Widow

LaRue, Neanderthal, in Reedy's Mirror.
Draw the Sword, Oh Republic, in the Independent.
Canticle of the Race, in Poetry, a Magazine of Verse.
Friar Yves, in the Cosmopolitan Magazine.
"I pay my debt for Lafayette and Rochambeau," in Fashions of the
Hour.
TOWARD THE GULF
Dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt
From the Cordilleran Highlands,
From the Height of Land
Far north.

From the Lake of the Woods,
From Rainy Lake,
From Itasca's
springs.
From the snow and the ice
Of the mountains,
Breathed on
by the sun,
And given life,
Awakened by kisses of fire,
Moving,
gliding as brightest hyaline
Down the cliffs,
Down the hills,
Over
the stones.
Trickling as rills;
Swiftly running as mountain brooks;

Swirling through runnels of rock;
Curving in spheréd silence

Around the long worn walls of granite gorges;
Storming through
chasms;
And flowing for miles in quiet over the Titan basin
To the
muddled waters of the mighty river,
Himself obeying the call of the
gulf,
And the unfathomed urge of the sea!

Waters of mountain peaks,
Spirits of liberty
Leaving your pure
retreats
For work in the world.
Soiling your crystal springs
With
the waste that is whirled to your breast as you run,
Until you are foul
as the crawling leviathan
That devours you,
And uses you to carry
waste and earth
For the making of land at the gulf,
For the conquest
of land for the feet of men.

De Soto, Marquette and La Salle
Planting your cross in vain,

Gaining neither gold nor ivory,
Nor tribute
For France or Spain.

Making land alone
For liberty!
You could proclaim in the name of
the cross
The dominion of kings over a world that was new.
But the
river has altered its course:
There are fertile fields
For a thousand
miles where the river flowed that you knew.
And there are liberty and
democracy
For thousands of miles
Where in the name of kings, and
for the cross
You tramped the tangles for treasure.

The Falls of St. Anthony tumble the waters
In laughter and tumult
and roaring of voices,
Swirling, dancing, leaping, foaming,
Spirits
of caverns, of canyons and gorges:
Waters tinctured by star-lights,
sweetened by breezes
Blown over snows, out of the rosy northlands,

Through forests of pine and hemlock,
Whisperings of the Pacific
grown symphonic.
Voices of freedom, restless, unconquered,
Mad
with divinity, fearless and free:--
Hunters and choppers, warriors,
revelers,
Laughers, dancers, fiddlers, freemen,
Climbing the crests
of the Alleghenies,
Singing, chopping, hunting, fighting
Erupting
into Kentucky and Tennessee,
Into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,

Sweeping away the waste of the Indians,
As the river carries mud for
the making of land.
And taking the land of Illinois from kings
And
handing its allegiance to the Republic.
What riflemen with Daniel
Boone for leader,
And conquerors with Clark for captain
Plunge
down like melted snows
The rocks and chasms of forbidden
mountains,
And make more land for freemen!
Clear-eyed,
hard-muscled, dauntless hunters,
Choppers of forests and tillers of
fields
Meet at last in a field of snow-white clover
To make wise
laws for states,
And to teach their sons of the new West
That
suffrage is the right of freemen.
Until the lion of Tennessee,
Who
crushes king-craft near the gulf.
Where La Salle proclaimed the
crown,
And the cross,
Is made the ruler of the republic
By
freeman suffragans,
And winners of the West!

Father of Waters! Ever recurring symbol of wider freedom,
Even to
the ocean girdled earth,
The out-worn rule of Florida rots your
domain.
But the lion of Tennessee asks: Would you take from Spain

The land she has lost but in name?
It shall be done in a month if
you loose my sword.
It was done as he said.
And the sick and
drunken power of Spain that clung,
And sucked at the life of Chile,
Peru, Argentina,
Loosened under the blows of