Toward the Gulf | Page 3

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 San Martin and Bolivar,?Breathing the lightning thrown by Napoleon the Great?On the thrones of Europe.?Father of Waters! 'twas you who made us say:?No kings this side of the earth forever!?One-half of the earth shall be free?By our word and the might that is