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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=532783" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Raft</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The whole world on a raft! A King is here,<br>The record of his grandeur but a smear.<br>Is it his deacon-beard, or old bald pate<br>That makes the band upon his whims to wait?<br>Loot and mud-honey have his soul defiled.<br>Quack, pig, and priest, he drives camp-meetings wild<br>Until they shower their pennies like spring rain<br>That he may preach upon the Spanish main.<br>What landlord, lawyer, voodoo-man has yet<br>A better native right to make men sweat?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The whole world on a raft! A Duke is here<br>At sight of whose lank jaw the muses leer.<br>Journeyman-printer, lamb with ferret eyes,<br>In life's skullduggery he takes the prize —<br>Yet stands at twilight wrapped in Hamlet dreams.<br>Into his eyes the Mississippi gleams.<br>The sandbar sings in moonlit veils of foam.<br>A candle shines from one lone cabin home.<br>The waves reflect it like a drunken star.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A banjo and a hymn are heard afar.<br>No solace on the lazy shore excels<br>The Duke's blue castle with its steamer-bells.<br>The floor is running water, and the roof<br>The stars' brocade with cloudy warp and woof.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And on past sorghum fields the current swings.<br>To Christian Jim the Mississippi sings.<br>This prankish wave-swept barque has won its place,<br>A ship of jesting for the human race.<br>But do you laugh when Jim bows down forlorn<br>His babe, his deaf Elizabeth to mourn?<br>And do you laugh, when Jim, from Huck apart<br>Gropes through the rain and night with breaking heart?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But now that imp is here and we can smile,<br>Jim's child and guardian this long-drawn while.<br>With knife and heavy gun, a hunter keen,<br>He stops for squirrel-meat in islands green.<br>The eternal gamin, sleeping half the day,<br>Then stripped and sleek, a river-fish at play.<br>And then well-dressed, ashore, he sees life spilt.<br>The river-bank is one bright crazy-quilt<br>Of patch-work dream, of wrath more red than lust,<br>Where long-haired feudist Hotspurs bite the dust...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This Huckleberry Finn is but the race,<br>America, still lovely in disgrace,<br>New childhood of the world, that blunders on<br>And wonders at the darkness and the dawn,<br>The poor damned human race, still unimpressed<br>With its damnation, all its gamin breast<br>Chorteling at dukes and kings with nigger Jim,<br>Then plotting for their fall, with jestings grim.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Behold a Republic<br>Where a river speaks to men<br>And cries to those that love its ways,<br>Answering again<br>When in the heart's extravagance<br>The rascals bend to say<br>&quot;O singing Mississippi<br>Shine, sing for us today.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But who is this in sweeping Oxford gown<br>Who steers the raft, or ambles up and down,<br>Or throws his gown aside, and there in white<br>Stands gleaming like a pillar of the night?<br>The lion of high courts, with hoary mane,<br>Fierce jester that this boyish court will gain —<br>Mark Twain!<br>The bad world's idol:<br>Old Mark Twain!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He takes his turn as watchman with the rest,<br>With secret transports to the stars addressed,<br>With nightlong broodings upon cosmic law,<br>With daylong laughter at this world so raw.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All praise to Emerson and Whitman, yet<br>The best they have to say, their sons forget.<br>But who can dodge this genius of the stream,<br>The Mississippi Valley's laughing dream?<br>He is the artery that finds the sea<br>In this the land of slaves, and boys still free.<br>He is the river, and they one and all<br>Sail on his breast, and to each other call.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Come let us disgrace ourselves,<br>Knock the stuffed gods from their shelves,<br>And cinders at the schoolhouse fling.<br>Come let us disgrace ourselves,<br>And live on a raft with gray Mark Twain<br>And Huck and Jim<br>And the Duke and the King.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Vachel+Lindsay">Vachel Lindsay</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=532783" data-title="The Raft de Vachel Lindsay" data-description="The whole world on a raft! A King is here,
The record of his grandeur but a smear.
Is it his deacon-beard, or old bald pate
That makes the band upon his whims to wait?
Loot and mud-honey have his soul defiled.
Quack, pig, and priest, he drives cam..."></div>
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