Today’s Poem: The Leaden-Eyed

It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull

Giacomo Favretto, The School of Painting, 1871 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Leaden-Eyed

by Vachel Lindsay

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
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We’re wrong to insist too much on a distinction between low modernists and high modernists in 20th-century poetry: It’s one of those divisions that has edges so fuzzy we find it hard to say exactly on which side most of the cataloged poets belong.

Still, something was clearly happening in the early 1920s, with the appearance of such work in 1923 as William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium. And though the edges may be uncertain, when we try to make a distinction between the populist low poets of modernism and the intellectual mandarins of high modernism, the centers of those camps are clear enough: Up on the hill, there’s T.S. Eliot. And down in the river bottoms, there’s Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931).

Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature, while Lindsay has a name that clings only to the last dendrites of memory — which tells us something about which camp triumphed in the standard telling of literary history.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t let Lindsay slip away entirely. A proponent of sung poetry, he was a man who walked, selling pamphlets of his poetry, from Florida to Kentucky in 1906, from New York City to Ohio in 1908, and from Illinois to New Mexico in 1912.

Vachel Lindsay in 1912 (Wikimedia Commons)

He was loud, and his poetry was sort of Whitmanesque and sort of free verse and sort of a set of rhythmical blasts. “Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle. / Never again will he hoo-doo you. / Never again will he hoo-doo you,” as he wrote in “The Congo” (1914). “Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole! / Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!” as he wrote in “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (1913).

Or take today’s Poem of the Day, his 1914 “The Leaden-Eyed.” A short poem (Lindsay tended to write long), it’s actually pretty competent rhymed verse: eight lines of pentameter. But for the poet the formal metrics are entirely unimportant when compared to the sound as the poem is read aloud. This is a poem not to study but to recite — its hard stresses gaining speed until that ending: “Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.”

The obvious interpretation is that the poem is a complaint about child labor, a railing against the suppression of the chances of the working class. And certainly that’s present, even dominant: The world’s poor “are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.”

But there’s more to Lindsay’s chanting we shouldn’t ignore when he reaches the concluding Not that/but lines. Bad that they starve, but worse that they “starve so dreamlessly” — “serve, but have no gods to serve.”

This was something in the air at the time, returning with a vengeance after the the First World War: a sense that modernity had produced new mass men with empty souls — Lindsay’s “The Leaden-Eyed” an unfocused precursor to José Ortega y Gasset’s Señorito Satisfecho in the 1930 Revolt of the Masses or C.S. Lewis’s Men without Chests in the 1943 The Abolition of Man.

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