STARVED ROCK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

STARVED ROCK
BY
EDGAR LEE MASTERS

Author of "Spoon River Anthology," "Songs and
Satires," "The Great Valley," "Toward
the Gulf," etc.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1919
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published, October, 1919

Certain of these poems first appeared in Reedy's Mirror,
Poetry, The Cosmopolitan, The Yale Review and The
New York Sun.

CONTENTS

STARVED ROCK

As a soul from whom companionships subside

The meaningless and onsweeping tide

Of the river hastening, as it would disown

Old ways and places, left this stone

Of sand above the valley, to look down

Miles of the valley, hamlet, village, town.

*****

It is a head-gear of a chief whose head,

Down from the implacable brow,

Waiting is held below

The waters, feather decked

With blossoms blue and red,

With ferns and vines;

Hiding beneath the waters, head erect,

His savage eyes and treacherous designs.

*****

It is a musing memory and memorial

Of geologic ages

Before the floods began to fall;

The cenotaph of sorrows, pilgrimages

Of Marquette and LaSalle.

The eagles and the Indians left it here

In solitude, blown clean

Of kindred things: as an oak whose leaves are sere

Fly over the valley when the winds are keen,

And nestle where the earth receives

Another generation of exhausted leaves.

*****

Fatigued with age its sleepless eyes look over

Fenced fields of corn and wheat,

Barley and clover.

The lowered pulses of the river beat

Invisibly by shores that stray

In progress and retreat

Past Utica and Ottawa,

And past the meadow where the Illini

Shouted and danced under the autumn moon,

When toddlers and papooses gave a cry,

And dogs were barking for the boon

Of the hunter home again to clamorous tents

Smoking beneath the evening's copper sky.

Later the remnant of the Illini

Climbed up this Rock, to die

Of hunger, thirst, or down its sheer ascents

Rushed on the spears of Pottawatomies,

And found the peace

Where thirst and hunger are unknown.

*****

This is the tragic and the fateful stone

Le Rocher or Starved Rock,

A symbol and a paradigm,

A sphinx of elegy and battle hymn,

Whose lips unlock

Life's secret, which is vanishment, defeat,

In epic dirges for the races

That pass and leave no traces

Before new generations driven in the blast

Of Time and Nature blowing round its head.

Renewing in the Present what the Past

Knew wholly, or in part, so to repeat

Warfare, extermination, old things dead

But brought to life again

In Life's immortal pain.

*****

What Destinies confer,

And laughing mock

LaSalle, his dreamings stir

To wander here, depart

The fortress of Creve Coeur,

Of broken heart,

For this fort of Starved Rock?

After the heart is broken then the cliff

Where vultures flock;

And where below its steeps the savage skiff

Cuts with a pitiless knife the rope let down

For water. From the earth this Indian town

Vanished and on this Rock the Illini

Thirsting, their buckets taken with the knife,

Lay down to die.

*****

This is the land where every generation

Lets down its buckets for the water of Life.

We are the children and the epigone

Of the Illini, the vanished nation.

And this starved scarp of stone

Is now the emblem of our tribulation,

The inverted cup of our insatiable thirst,

The Illini by fate accursed,

This land lost to the Pottawatomies,

They lost the land to us,

Who baffled and idolatrous,

And thirsting, spurred by hope

Kneel upon aching knees,

And with our eager hands draw up the bucketless rope.

*****

This is the tragic, the symbolic face,

Le Rocher or Starved Rock,

Round which the eternal turtles drink and swim

And serpents green and strange,

As race comes after race,

War after war.

This is the sphinx whose Memnon lips breathe dirges

To empire's wayward star,

And over the race's restless urges,

Whose lips unlock

Life's secret which is vanishment and change.

HYMN TO THE DEAD

O, you who have gone from the ways of cities,

From the peopled places, the streets of strife,

From offices, markets, rooms, retreats,

Pastoral ways, hamlets, everywhere from the earth,

And have made of the emptiness of your departure

A land, a country, a realm all your own,

Set above the hills of our vision, an empire

Within, around, above our empire of days,

Of pain and clamorous tongues;

An empire which out of a sovereign silence

Stretches its power over the restless multitude

Of our thoughts, and the ceaseless music of our beings,

And surrounds us even as the air we breathe—

O ye majestic Dead, hear our hymn!

*****

The clown, the wastrel and the fool in life

Are lifted up by you, O Death!

The least of these who has entered in

Your realm, O Death,

Is greater than the greatest of us,

And by a transfiguration has been clothed

With the glory and the wonder of nature.

He has drunk of the purple cup of apotheosis,

And passed through the mystical change,

And accomplished the cycle of being.

He has risen from the lowlands of earth

Into the air on wings of breath.

He has rejected the shell of the body, feet and hands,

He has become one with the majesty of Time,

And taken the kingdom of triumph

Whether it be cessation or bliss.

For he has entered into the kingdom of primal powers,

Being or ceasing to be,

Even as he has re-entered the womb of nature.

Or he has found peace,

States of wisdom, or vision—

Hail! realm of Silence,

Whence comes the unheard symphony too deep for strings,

Hail, infinite Light,

Darkness to eyes of flesh—

All hail!

*****

What are we, the living, beside you the dead?

We of daily hunger, daily food, daily ablutions,

The daily rising and lying down,

Waking and sleep;

The daily care of the body's needs;

And daily desire to pass the gift of life;

And daily fears of the morrow to come;

And daily pains for things that are gone;

And daily longing for things that fly us;

And sorrow that follows wherever we go;

And love that mocks us, and peace that breaks,

And shame that tracks us, and want that gnaws.

But O ye Dead! Ye great ones,

Triumphant over these, released

From the duties of dust, all chains of desire,

And made inhabitants of breathless spaces,

Immanent in a realm of calm,

Rulers of a sphere of tideless air,

Victors returned from the war of death in life,

Victors over death in death!

*****

For the growing soul turns in

Even as the seed turns in on itself,

And becomes hard, transparent,

An encased life, condensed

In the process of saving itself

From rains that beat in the fall,

And frosts that descend from skies grown cold.

And we who shed away old thoughts and hopes,

Days and dreams of life

Turn in, grow clear like grains of rice,

Until the realm of death

Is as snow delivered land

Luring the seed—

And it becomes our home, our country,

Our native land that calls us back

From this sojourn of adventure,

And place of profit;

For O ye majestic Dead, your absence draws us,

If it be naught but absence still you summon,

Your absence has become a very Presence,

A Power, a hierarchy of Life!

*****

Even as leaves enrich the earth

Layer on layer,

Even as bodies of men enrich the soil

Generation on generation,

So do the spirits of those departed

Enrich our soil of life

With delights, wisdoms, purest hopes,

And shapes of beauty.

But oh beyond all these, is our life enriched

With exalted contemplations

Of you, O glorious Dead,

Who have eaten of the tree of life and become gods,

Friendly divinities to us who remain,

Dear familiars, as you were with us

Fathers, children, lovers, friends.

Ye who sense with the inner eye,

Since nothing in our days of living

Moves uncolored of your splendors,

Presences to which all things relate!

*****

O realm of the Dead,

Black Mountain, if you be,

Which darkens heaven,

And shadows earth,

Round which our spirits flutter

Like startled moths.

Black mountain with whose blackness

The light of life is mixed,

Whereof all hues are made:

All thoughts, all lofty wanderings of the soul,

All meanings, divinations

Of briefest hours, and frailest joys,

All wonders of the spectrum of the soul

Out of life and death!

*****

Realm of the Dead! Supreme Reality

All Hail!

CREATION

Passion flower unfolding in darkness!

Glow-worm under a spray of lilac!

Flame on the altar of love!

Beloved in your chamber!

The phoenix moon rising from the ashes of day

Spreads her wings of saffron fire

Above the enchanted garden.

And I brush away the leaves of night

To find the star of my love.

I part the curtains about the altar,

I enter your chamber, beloved.

*****

I have entered your chamber, beloved,

I have found my star.

Between kisses and whispers

And the silken touch of flesh

Breast to breast, lips to lips,

Our souls are seeking and drifting!

As an albatross hovers and flies

With the running sea ...

Powers of body, powers of spirit,

Divinities

Awakened never before,

Hidden in nerves asleep, in veins without a tide

Flow through us.

I give you my life, beloved,

For life of you, given to me—

O bride of love!

*****

O hair of fire! O breasts of light,

Like double stars!

O voice like a lute that whispers

At midnight, in a bower of roses!

O body luminous as the nebulous waste

Across the midnight,

Pour on my breast, my hands, my brow

The sacred fire,

As our flesh becomes one

Upborne by your breasts,

White as bridal blossoms

Where there is yet no milk,

But only eddying blood

Circling in whirlpools of delirious ecstasy

In time with the blood of me.

Our lips together, our bodies together

While the yearning urn of porphyry

Waits to drink the silver stream,

And thirsts to drink,