Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE CITY, by AMOS RUSSEL WELLS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE CITY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I watched the country harden to a town
Last Line: Far in the golden city of the skies.
Subject(s): Cities; Urban Life


I watched the country harden to a town
Beneath the blight of men. The rivulets
Congealed to pavements all their plashy curves;
The glens prolonged their mossy wandering walls
To formal parallels of brick and stone;
The meadows, lashed by many a measuring line,
Yielded their sunny graces. Day by day
The petrifying spell grew slowly on.
My bending willows saw their foodful marsh
Slip into drains. The furrow, mellow-drawn,
Became a noisome gutter. Sacred woods,
Bared to the mocking and irreverent day,
Broadened their shuddering pillars into homes
For men that tortured them. The very hills
Abased the quiet sceptre of their pines
And laid it low upon foundation-stones,
Sunk in the conquering plain. The hermit-thrush
Withdrew before the sparrow's chattering tribe,
And over all the ferns and forest flowers
Stole the white leprosy of city streets.

And now the transformation has its way,
The flaunting town become the country's grave,
And wearing, like a statue on a tomb,
Crude hints of buried beauty. Here a church
Apes with its formal arch a forest aisle,
Yonder a spire, a sharp and stiffened thing,
Accosts the sky as once a gracious tree
Tossed from that place its greeting to the dawn.
Earth baked and reddened, in huge hideousness
Upreared, a towering honeycomb of brick,
Still in its bulk holds memory of the hill,
The sunny flanked and bird-frequented hill,
Destroyed to give it room. From curb to curb
Among the hurrying wheels the newsboys flit,
Pert like the squirrels they succeeded there;
And lo! upon the very ground where once
The harmless snake lay basking in the sun
Now coils the reeking still, and from the door
Darts like an adder's fang the brandied air.

A rod of town outcurses many a league
Of country's worst. Red eyes in shadowy caves,
The treacherous branches where the cougar lurks,
The marshes' dull miasmas, and the crash
Of desolating landslips; what are they?
For not alone the finger-pointed crime,
Thick-painted lust and murder manifest
Parade the city streets, to mock with sin
The worst the outlaw woodland ever knew,
But on these acres where the generous oaks
Grew brotherly from out a common soil,
Entwined their branches in the common air,
Shielded the undergrowth, nor ever dreamed
That one should drink the rain that fell on all,
Or draw a double nurture to his roots,
Or rout the weakest sapling, -- here, behold!
A growth of selfish-gorging, glutton men;
Men that will push their brothers from the soil,
Men whose supreme of high accomplishment
Is to surround a single fattened trunk
With lifeless acres, yea, with league on league
Reserved for rootings of that tree alone.

O city, foul with huge injustices! --
A thousand men cramped in the space of one,
A thousand lives bound to the whim of one,
A thousand faint that one may overfeed, --
Discern the parable of earth and sky:
The trees that calmly lift their emerald towers
And push their white petitions through the soil
Far to the answering juices, with no fear
That guile or greed will slay their livelihood
And tear them from their toil; the headlong bee,
That revels in the summer treasuries,
Nor has competitors in honey-craft;
The peaceful ranks of unmolested clouds,
That bear unfretted on their even way
Each his appointed burden, blessedly
Sure of the blessed benison of work,
That no cold corporation of the air,
At hint of pressure on its plethoric purse
Dismissing half its cloudy servitors,
Will shrewdly save its surplus with their all.
Shame that the willing labor of a man
Should be less stable than the filmy cloud's!
And shame that an immortal's chance to toil
Should be less certain than ephemerids'!
And strange, and strange, and piteously strange,
That, facing each abode of cultured wealth,
The street should all be full of pallid men,
And women weary-eyed and children gaunt,
Their hands outstretched to beg they know not what,
Or clinched in anger at they know not whom,
Or lifted, groping, to the hopeless heavens.

Yet here, amid these sties of selfishness,
These sties of marble or of common brick,
Some fragrance of the forest lingers still,
Some touch of woodland majesty and grace.
Deep in an ugly block I know a home
Whence, like a spring from out a bank of ferns,
Flow benedictions of large kindliness
And noble thinking. Yonder at his trade
Painfully drudges an imperial man,
A man of oak, erect to bar the course
Of any vague iniquity, nor bow
Though all the sky is full of thunderbolts.
Here, from the lowest deeps of bitter life,
I see a spirit lifted on a hill
Fronting the east and crowned with morning stars.
And over all these dark and huddled homes
Brooding in thought, or through the cankered streets
Carrying balm, behold, the kindly rich: --
Their gold for giving, and their charity
The better gold of manly brotherhood.
Ah, when I see this dawning commonwealth,
Too dim, too far, but growing with the years;
Yes, when I learn what royalty is here
Amid the outcast, what a wealth of worth
Among the poor, and what a loveliness
Of patient, cheery living in these homes
So barren to the eye, oh, then I know
The city's glory and the city's grace,
Outforesting the woodlands in its joy,
Passing in fruitfulness the golden fields.

To this end died the country into town, --
Not that the press of groaning human lives
Serve for a mint to stamp a rich man's gold;
But blessedly, that men in brotherhood
May make a better country of the town, --
The teeming soil of philanthropic thought,
The atmosphere of hope, the kindly rain
Of sympathetic tears, such flower and fruit
As grew in paradise before the fall.
Far may it spread, this country of the town!
Spread till the current of a nobler life
Rise in our human veins; till brick and stone
Have lost the memory of sobs, and learned
The largeness of the woodland; till the right --
The kingly right -- of toil is free to all
As to a beast, and none that wills to work
May fear the future more than squirrels fear;
Till men have leave to grow, -- more hearty leave
Than ever forest gave to any tree;
Till all men live for one, and all for all,
And no man for himself, the city's soul
Leaping above the fields from which it grew,
The self-concentred fields, the grasping roots;
Leaping above as far as man is high
Above a grass-blade, the bestowing God
Above the fear-filled begging of a man.
O brothers, here amid the clanging streets
And clashing voices and contending aims,
Be bold to live a life beyond your life!
The palace may invite, the bank allure,
But man is more than ease and God than gold!
Within the smoking ruins of a wood
Seeds of another forest lie in wait,
Of differing nature, pine succeeding oak
Or birches, pine. And so the country dies,
Burned over by the city's greedy flames.
Now -- grant it, God! and grant it, godly men! --
Let other forests from its ashes leap,
A second growth of more majestic form,
Like to the trees of life that tower and bloom,
Bathed by the river of eternity,
Far in the golden city of the skies.





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