The Project Gutenberg eBook ofGoing-to-the-Sun

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofGoing-to-the-SunThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Going-to-the-SunAuthor: Vachel LindsayRelease date: October 26, 2020 [eBook #63554]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOING-TO-THE-SUN ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Going-to-the-SunAuthor: Vachel LindsayRelease date: October 26, 2020 [eBook #63554]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Title: Going-to-the-Sun

Author: Vachel Lindsay

Release date: October 26, 2020 [eBook #63554]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOING-TO-THE-SUN ***

GOING-TO-THE-SUN

GOING-TO-THE-SUNBYVACHEL LINDSAYAUTHOR OF “GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTHENTERS HEAVEN,” “THE CONGO,” ETC.D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIII

BYVACHEL LINDSAYAUTHOR OF “GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTHENTERS HEAVEN,” “THE CONGO,” ETC.D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIII

GOING-TO-THE-SUN

This book is a sequel and a reply to a book by Stephen Graham, explorer-poet, and Vernon Hill, artist.

I had a splendid six weeks tramping with my lifetime friend, Stephen Graham, in the Rockies. We climbed northwest through Glacier Park, Montana, across the Canadian line into Alberta, Canada. There it is in two sentences.

It would take more than theEncyclopædia Britannicato tell on how many points I differ from Stephen, and on how many points I agree with him. I had not the least idea that so much Lindsay was going into Graham’s fireside notes—while I was asleep at noon, often recovering in an hour from ten hours of restless, sleepless freezing by night. I do not hold myself liable in court for any opinions of mine then recorded by Graham. My daytime strength was not all given to thought, however, but often to trying to keep Graham in sight when he was a quarter of a mile ahead of me climbing mountains absolutely perpendicular. As I remember our first fireside discussions, they were as to whether there was actually such a person as Patrick Henry. Graham had an idea he was a perverse invention of my own fancy. But he looked him up afterwards and found there was such a man. As I remember our conversations after that provocation, I kept trying to deliver to him from memory Bryce’sAmerican Commonwealth, unabridged, two volumes, one thousand pages each. I remember those volumes well. I read every page in lonely country hotels and on slow local trains while a Sunday field-worker for the Anti-Saloon League. And now invisible leavesof Bryce often made the chief ingredient of our tea. So I have indicated in the design.

I did not tell Graham I was quoting the great ambassador, and so many unsupported, heavy and formidable statements he quite properly hesitated to write out, without further confirmation, though he drank them down quite cheerfully. In the great blank spaces in Graham’s narrative where he skips really splendid scenery, I was quoting Bryce—not always singing hymns!

The most authentic part of my book, the part Mr. Vernon Hill has left out, is that the mountains were as steep as I have drawn them. His mountains, otherwise quite correct, are not sufficiently perpendicular. Vernon Hill, of course, was not physically with us on the expedition. He was in London, drawing beautiful and famous Arcadian Calendars. When later he came to illustrate Graham’s book in London, with Graham bending over him, no one mentioned the fact that the mountains were all like church steeples. Graham had not noticed it, and it did not occur to Vernon Hill by wireless. Otherwise Vernon Hill was in excellent communication with us, and every picture in Graham’s book expresses exactly what Graham was talking to me about to make meforget the tumbles and the briers, and to drown out the Bryce.

After I had hunted for years and years to find an explorer-poet who would take a long walk with me, and had scared every one off by the elaborateness of the proposal, the first troubadour that took me up on it almost broke my neck. It was a grand and awful time. The sensible reviews of Graham’s book have been by Walter Prichard Eaton. He does not discuss Graham’s opinions or mine. But he is very plain about the fact that we almost slid into eternity. He has tried those mountains himself, and he knows. He should write several more reviews.

Stephen Graham is a lifetime friend, and I have assembled these drawings as a sign thereof. But because I have been studying Hieroglyphics in the Metropolitan Museum all this summer, and because United States Hieroglyphics of my own invention are haunting me day and night, this book is drawn, and not written. I serve notice on the critics—the verses are most incidental, merely to explain the pictures. And so, directly considered, it is much more a reply to Vernon Hill, the artist, than to Stephen.

The artist of the Arcadian Calendar discernedrightly. Graham and I were in Arcady, even if it was a bit rough.

Going-To-The-Sun Mountain is the very jewel of the mountains of Glacier Park. All the tourists love it, and they are right. Its name fits it.

Going-To-The-Sun Mountain is our American Fujiyama, as all testify who have seen it.

Obviously, an ingredient of good tea is talk on Egyptian Hieroglyphics. I had an invisible copy of an Egyptian Grammar with me and I put a leaf from it into every pot of tea. Graham did not take to the taste of it as much as he did to the pages of Bryce, but he was nobly patient, as one may say, with Egypt.

The Hieroglyphics in this work are based on two more British-Egyptian grammars he sent me after he reached London. Still, they may be described as United States Hieroglyphics, and almost any Egyptologist will be willing to describe them that way, having about as much to do with Egypt as Egyptian cigarettes. The Egyptians were, briefly, a nation of Vernon Hills, who drew their “Arcadian Calendar” for four thousand years in red and black ink, or cut it in granite.I keep thinking about them!A free translation of the hieroglyphic inscription at the bottom of the first picture following is:

The beating heart of the waterfall of thedouble truth, as it appears to a scribe,a servant of Thoth—Thoth, who is god ofpicture-writing, photoplays and hieroglyphics,and an intense admirer of waterfalls.

With this start, the reader can go straight through the book without a mistake.

Now, a last word as to the seal,The Elements of Good Tea.

On the southern side of the Canadian-United States boundary, just as we reached it, our coffee gave out. Most symbolical happening! There in the deep woods, as we passed to the northern side, Graham said with a sigh of insatiable anticipation: “Now we will have some tea.” We had had tea all along, alternated with coffee. But now Stephen, on his own heath, was emphatic about it. So he made tea, a whole potful, with a kick like a battering ram, and I drank my half.

Certainly the most worth-while thing in Stephen’s book, and mine, is a matter known to all men long before the books were written. That is,that a Britisher and a United Stateser can cross the Canadian-American line together and discover that it is hardly there; can discover that an international boundary can be genuine and eternal and yet friendly. If there is one thing on which Stephen and I will agree till the Judgment Day, it is that all the boundaries in the world should be as open, and as happy, as the Canadian-United States line. To many diplomats such a boundary is incredible, and yet it exists, one of the longest in the world.

Vachel Lindsay

Tricking us, making our hearts their prey,The dreams of the dreams, with books of the dreams,Haunt the homes of the town this day;The visions of rivers, with rhymes of the waterfalls,Haunt the yards of the town this day;The fairies of the fairies, with the flowers of the fairies,Haunt the factories of the town this day;And we throw them kisses, and they fly away.Tricking us, making our hearts their prey,The angels of the angels, with the flags of the angels,Haunt the clouds above the town this day,And we throw them kisses and they fly away.And they call us west to the glacial mountains,To the mines that are books, to the natural fountains.

Tricking us, making our hearts their prey,The angels of the angels, with the flags of the angels,Haunt the clouds above the town this day,And we throw them kisses and they fly away.And they call us west to the glacial mountains,To the mines that are books, to the natural fountains.

The mountain peak called “Going-To-The-Sun,”In Glacier Park,Is the most gorgeous one,And when the sun comes down to it, it glowsWith emerald and rose.

On the mountain peak, called “Going-To-The-Sun,”I saw the rooster that no storm can tame,The center of the sun was but his eye,His comb was but the sun rays and the flame.There in the Glacier Park, above white glaciers,There, above Montana and the west,He crowed and called his boast around the world,Emotion shook his red embroidered vest.There is humor in the very biggest rooster,But even more magnificence than fun.I laugh because he acted like a rooster,I am solemn, for he was the biggest one.I like a rooster or a turkey gobbler,I like their forthright impudence at times.They are neither larks, nor trilling nightingales,And yet they always sing in splendid rhymes.When I heard the vast bird of the sunrise crying,The world held not one inch of silly prose.Any rooster is a flowerlike fowl,And this one was a crimson Yankee rose.

Round the mountain peak called “Going-To-The-Sun,”In Glacier Park, a steep and soaring one,Circled a curious bird with pointed noseWho led us on to every cave, and roseAnd swept through every cloud, then brought us berries,And all the acid gifts the mountain carries,And let us guess which ones were good to eat.And even when we slept his sharp wings beatThe weary fire, or shook the tree-top cones,Or rattled dead twigs like a fairy’s bones.The vulgar bird, “Curiosity”! When weWere tired, and lean, and shaking at the knee,We put this bird in harness. He was strongAs any ostrich, pulled our packs along,Helped us up over the next annoying wall,And dragged us to the chalet, and the tourists’ resting hall.And when once more we were young, well-fed men,He beat the door to call us forth again.

And when once more we were young, well-fed men,He beat the door to call us forth again.

The Thistlevine saw the butterfliesDisappear through the morning skies.

By the mountain peak, called “Going-To-The-Sun,”A dizzy mountain, where paths twist round and roundAnd nothing in sober order can be found—I asked the poppies: “What fairies do you see?”And they shook their long stems, and they laughed at me.

A fairy ran a circusWith a pigeon puffed and proud,A humble bullfrogAnd a rather solid cloud.She wore her underwear,The rest wore what they had,The frog wore a blue coatJust like his dad.The pigeon wore his feathersAnd spread himself—O My!The cloud wore sunshineHe gathered in the sky.

A fairy ran a circusWith a pigeon puffed and proud,A humble bullfrogAnd a rather solid cloud.

She wore her underwear,The rest wore what they had,The frog wore a blue coatJust like his dad.

The pigeon wore his feathersAnd spread himself—O My!The cloud wore sunshineHe gathered in the sky.

On the mountain peak I reached the driftAnd I took it for a Christmas gift,And I made ten soldiers out of snow.But the battle-ax of my fairy foeCut to the ground my men of snow.And who was he, my fairy foe,Who brought my snowy army low?The mountain sun was my fairy foe.

On the mountain peak I reached the driftAnd I took it for a Christmas gift,And I made ten soldiers out of snow.

But the battle-ax of my fairy foeCut to the ground my men of snow.

And who was he, my fairy foe,Who brought my snowy army low?

The mountain sun was my fairy foe.

On the high slope of Going-To-The-SunIs a stormy Christmas, all year round,And snow-filled Christmas trees abound.

Up the good slope of Going-To-The-Sun,I saw the Pheasant-Of-The-Sunrise fly.Jewels in his feathers, mixed with dew.Dew and jewels made his jeweled eye.He paused to make a sonnet, which he sang,Though nowhere else are pheasants sonneteers.He emphasized with swooping and with skipping,With winkings and intoxicated leers.And how the bushes twinkled as he caroled:“Each morning is another birthday, friend.And I have lived so many happy birthdays!There are gifts with all the suns that here ascend!Each bush, you see, has an unextinguished candleAnd angel-food, and icing, and candy flowers,And this long vine that climbs from earth to heavenGives me thoughts, and most erratic powers.I eat its scarlet berries and its frosting.If I choose, it is my present every day.Then I can fly straight up to heaven’s doorstepFollowing the green line all the way.

“Each morning is another birthday, friend.And I have lived so many happy birthdays!There are gifts with all the suns that here ascend!Each bush, you see, has an unextinguished candleAnd angel-food, and icing, and candy flowers,And this long vine that climbs from earth to heavenGives me thoughts, and most erratic powers.I eat its scarlet berries and its frosting.If I choose, it is my present every day.Then I can fly straight up to heaven’s doorstepFollowing the green line all the way.

“And then I tumble like a limber leafTo my nest here, and another year is doneOr another thousand years, what does it matterOn the mountain peak called ‘Going-To-The-Sun’?”

On the mountain peak, called “Going-To-The-Sun,”I saw the Unicorn-No-Storm-Can-Tame.The center of the sun was but his eye,His mane was but the sun rays and the flame.There in that Glacier Park, above green pastures,There above Stephen’s camp fire in the rocks,He foamed and pawed and whinnied round the world,His feathered sides and plumes and bristling locksSeemed but the banners of a great announcementThat unicorns were spry as heretofore,That not a camp fire of the world was dead,That dragons lived in them, and thousands moreCamp-born, were clawing at the clouds of Asia,Were rising with to-morrow’s dawn for men,Camp-fire dragons, with the ancient unicornBringing the Rosicrucian days again.Any unicorn can drive awayAny thoughts the grown-up race has spoiled.When I heard the Unicorn-of-Sunset rampingNew fancies in my veins bubbled and boiled.

Any unicorn is worth his oats,And so we fed him bacon, and we madeAn extra cup of tea, which he drank.Then he curled up coltwise, and in slumber sank.Dragons sprang up, next day, where he had stayed.They were in Fujiyama silks arrayed,Or spoke of Everest to Stephen. Then beganDiscussing the strange peak in DarienThat poets climb to see the Pacific well.How Stephen climbed it later, I will let him tell.Following the Unicorn-No-Storm-Can-TameAlone, in tropic woods, is a great game.

On the mountain peak, called “Going-To-The-Sun,”I saw old Johnny Appleseed once more.He ate an apple, threw away the core.Then turned and smiled and slackly watched it fallInto a crevice of the mountain wall.In an instant there was an apple tree,The roots split up the rocks beneath our feet,And apples rolled down the green mountainsideAnd fairies popped from them, flying and free!

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