Page:John Brown's body by Stephen Vincent Benét.djvu/13



American muse, whose strong and diverse heart

So many men have tried to understand

But only made it smaller with their art,

Because you are as various as your land,

As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,

Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,

As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,

And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

Swift runner, never captured or subdued,

Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,

That half a hundred hunters have pursued

But never matched their bullets with the dream,

Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry

And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.

You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost

With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,

The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,

The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,

And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns

Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,

The grey Maine rocks—and the war-painted dawns

That break above the Garden of the Gods.

The prairie-schooners crawling towards the ore

And the cheap car, parked by the station-door.