Chapter VIII: Part FOUR: The Magic Pilgrimage (3)

Then I climbed up into the airplane. The man who had once save Lenin's life (so I was informed) fixed me in place, and the plane sped over the vast field of snow and up into the air. A snowstorm was raging, but I was perfectly protected and felt no fear. Only I could not see anything. The pilot missed his bearings and got a little lost in the storm and we had to come down far from our landing place. The pilot and I got out of the plane and started to walk toward the naval base. The blizzard blew hard and we could see nothing. But it was a fine exhilarating tramp, and, warm in my great boots and fur clothes, I enjoyed the sensation of thinking I was doing a little Arctic stunt.

At last an automobile came rolling over the hard snow and took us to our landing place. They had been scouting for us, knowing that something must have happened when we did not arrive. At the landing place I found that a crack squad of sailors, fine handsome fellows, had been waiting for us for hours in the blizzard. They were not rigged out, like myself and the pilot, against the bad weather, and were cold. For the life of me I couldn't understand why a squad of men should have been detailed to await my arrival at the air base, when I was no kind of official. And I had been told that my visit was an informal thing. Right there I remembered my experience in the Pennsylvania railroad service--how often, in the cold steel car out on the track, our crew waited for hours in biting zero weather until the late train arrived and steamed us out. And sometimes we were frost-bitten.

My interpreter said that the sailors were expecting a speech. So I said that although I anticipated with joy my visit among them in Kronstadt, I felt sorry that it had been necessary for them to wait for me all those hours in the cold. All the official routine ceremonials were extremely tiresome to me. Even though they were the expression of the workers' and peasants' united authority and were therefore simplified, they were nevertheless tedious. I can work up no enthusiasm for official ritual, however necessary, whether it be red or pink or black or white. In Russia I was alertly aware that it was something different from anything that ever was, that officially it was the highest privilege I could have in the world, to be shown the inside working of the greatest social experiment in the history of civilization. I was fired and uplifted by the thundering mass movement of the people, their boisterous surging forward, with their heads held high, their arms outstretched in an eager quest for more light, more air, more space, more glory, more nourishment and comfort for the millions of the masses. But the bureaucratic control left me unmoved. Yet I was conscious that it was the axis of the mighty moving energy of the people, that without it their movement would be futile.

So I was actually in Kronstadt, the first fortress fired by the signal of the revolution. The features of the fort were covered up with snow, but the splendid men holding it showed me the inside of battleships and submarines, the loading of big guns, and I saw also the educational classes, Communist meetings, recreation halls with motion pictures and feats of gymnastics and dancing, the new revolutionary spirit animating men and officers alike, the simple dignified discipline of rank and precedence, organization and work.

After a strenuous day, that night I slept soundly on a flagship. The next day I motored back to Petrograd. In the afternoon I went to tea with Korney Chukovsky and his sympathetic wife. Chukovsky was a popular liberal journalist and author of the old régime, and was now an equally popular fellow-traveler with the new. He was a radical liberal in his political opinions, but consistently non-political in his writings. Under the old régime he was a contributor to the Moscow newspaper, _Russky Slovo_, which had a circulation of over a million. He had recently finished a book for children, called _Crocodile_, which became a best-seller. Chukovsky was a member of a Russian intellectual mission to the Allied capitals, in 1916, I think. He exhibited a large souvenir book of interesting autographs of famous personages: Asquith, Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill, Poincaré, Millerand, Anatole France, Kipling, H.G. Wells, and many more. I added mine. Chukovsky showed me also a couple of letters from Lenin to Gorky, which he prized highly, and some newspaper cuttings of a critical duel between him and Trotsky over the evaluation of the work of the poet Alexander Blok, who wrote the tragic poem, "The Twelve." This poem evoked in me something of the spiritual agony of "The Hound of Heaven." Chukovsky gave me the gist of the controversy between him and Trotsky. Chukovsky had done a fine literary critique of Blok. Trotsky had overemphasized an inoffensive literary reference to the revolution to score a political point. I thought that Chukovsky was right and Trotsky was wrong. Chukovsky went with me to the House of the Intellectuals and introduced me to some of the writers and artists. I remember the names of Metchnikov, son of the scientist and disciple of Pasteur, and the Princess X, who was rich before the revolution, but expropriated now and living with artists whom she had befriended during the salad days of the bourgeoisie.

The next day was fine and clear as crystal. And to make up for what I had missed when we flew to Kronstadt, the aviator came and took me up for an hour's ride over Petrograd and suburbs. I ended that trip to Petrograd with affectionate farewells from the naval schools. One of them elected me an honorary officer. There, too, I talked with a very interesting officer. He was a graduate of an exclusive Czarist academy, young, exceeding handsome, with very sensitive features. We spoke with difficulty in a kind of lingua franca or _petit-negre_, to be more precise. He informed me that he had an American wife and invited me to dinner with them. I said it might be an embarrassing matter to his wife, that he should first ask her. He said she knew all about me and had suggested the invitation.

I wondered about this American wife of the Russian officer. I had been warned to beware of English-speaking bourgeois persons, who might try to pump things out of me. But as I possessed no secrets of any kind and as I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order struggling to extricate itself from the old, I never turned aside from anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fulness of my exciting adventure.

I had already met some extraordinary people of the old régime. Besides the Russians, I had encountered a most wonderful Englishwoman, who reminded me of a character out of H.G. Wells's _Food of The Gods_. This woman had been an English governess in Russia under the old régime and had married a second-or third-class Russian official. She had a nice apartment in Petrograd. Her beautiful daughter was a clerk in one of the Soviet departments, and sometimes the mother herself was requisitioned as an interpreter. In her sitting room there was a photograph of the late Czar and Czarina, with the Czarina smudged out. It was a bold thing to have the photograph of the Czar in your sitting room in 1922. But she was an Englishwoman first, even though she had been married to a Russian and was now a Soviet citizen. She said to me: "I preserve the photograph of the Czar because he is the cousin of King George. He was a good man, but his wife was a bad German woman." Also she had the picture of King George alongside that of Lenin on another wall. "They are the two big men in the world," she said to me, "and I make my curtsy to them every morning: the ruler of England, my native land, and the ruler of Russia, my adopted country."

She was very proud and pleased with my notorious self because I was born a British subject and had lived in London. She didn't even mind when I said that I did not like the English people as a whole, but admired some individuals. Indeed, she liked it, because that also was her feeling. I spent a long evening in her house and ate very English roast beef and plum pudding. Perhaps too much. For later it was necessary for me to go to the w. c. There I was amazed to see, placed prominently upon the wall, a hand-printed card bearing the motto: "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." When I returned to the sitting room I complimented her on her nice old English calligraphy, but said that I wondered why she had put up the notice in English, when most of her visitors must be Russians, who did not know the English language. She said, "When the Russians don't understand, they will ask, because they are a curious people. I have to have these English hints around to remind them that we are a superior people."

Eliminating my military aide from Moscow and my officer-interpreter of the Baltic fleet, I went alone to the officer's apartment. His American wife turned out to be a Latin-American. She was unmistakably an octoroon. She was pretty, and, if she had been taller, would have been a great beauty. Nevertheless she had had a pretty time under the old régime and had been celebrated as an exotic flower in smart and expensive bohemian circles. When the revolution overwhelmed the Capital, this exotic creature of the smart set married the young officer who had worshipped her in the hectic pre-revolutionary period, and who had decided, when the revolution came, to serve under the Bolsheviks.

She spoke nice English. Also, she had prepared a good dinner, with that Russian pink cold soup that isn't so good to look at, but most excellent to taste, caviar, ham, some sort of boiled meat, and Caucasian wine. She talked a lot about herself and her husband and their son. His son, really, by a first marriage. He was a lad going to high school, and they were worried about him. They said that the boy would never have a chance under the Bolshevik régime. And the officer said that he himself was having only half a chance, that he was absolutely loyal to the Communists, because he was convinced that they were in Russia to stay and that nothing now could take the power away from them. But the Communists did not trust him because he had been a former Czarist officer. They were training the proletarian youths to become officers, and as soon as the proletarian cadets were trained, the old officers would be superseded. I asked him if he were certain that the Czarist officers who had come over wholeheartedly to the revolution would really be kicked out of their positions when the young proletarian officers were trained to take their place. He said that that was positively true, for it was a Communist policy which had been stated publicly. I said that I was going to find out, without quoting him. He said that I might.

However, I did not mention the subject right away to anyone in Petrograd. After ten fleeting days with the glorious Red fleet, seeing and hearing all and believing that all was a dream, I returned to Moscow for the third time. Only when I came back to Petrograd a month later and for the last time, to get a boat for Germany, did I speak about the officer's case to my friend the Red officer, member of the Communist Party and of the Petrograd Soviet. A young man he was, small, quiet, ordinary-looking and so unobtrustive that you wouldn't imagine his importance in the Red navy and in the higher Communist councils unless you could appreciate the power of his clear, cold blue and all-seeing eyes. I was interested in what the officer had said because a high-school teacher in Moscow had said the same thing to me, as had also a lady of the old régime who was acting as interpreter when I visited one of the Petrograd courts during a trial.

I wanted to ascertain whether the members of the defeated bourgeoisie who were working for the Soviets could not be guaranteed the security of their jobs if they were loyal to the Soviets. For it seemed to me that if they felt their positions were insecure and that there was no future for their children under the new régime, they naturally would sabotage the Soviets. The Red officer confirmed the statement of the former Czarist officer: that the bourgeois officers would be superseded as soon as the proletarian cadets could be trained to take their place. I said I thought such a procedure unfair, and that it would make the bourgeois workers enemies of the Soviet system instead of friends, and force them into sabotage. The Red commander said that the Communist controllers were alert to detect any tendency toward sabotage on the part of bourgeois employees of the Soviets, and he accused me of bourgeois sentimentality.

I said that if he had said intellectual sentimentality, he might have been perhaps right, but that I couldn't have the sentiments of a class I was not born into or educated with. I did not think that there was any such thing as intellectual equality, I told him, and that radicals had a sentimental way of confusing social with intellectual equality. I said further, that I did not believe that talent could spring up easily out of a people, like grass under one's feet.

The officer asked who had been talking to me about the matter. I said that nobody in particular, but different persons in Moscow and Petrograd had spoken of it. Which was strictly true. There was a sequel. A year later I was in Paris one afternoon, waiting to cross from the Place de l'Opéra to the Café de la Paix, when I was suddenly touched on the shoulder. I turned and found myself face to face with the officer. We went to the café for a drink. The officer had arrived in France with other officers to recover some Czarist ships which the French government held somewhere down on the North African coast. We reminisced about the splendid Red days we had enjoyed together in Petrograd and Moscow. We talked about our friends of the foreign office and the Comintern. I had already met some of them in Berlin and Paris. And he said, "Do you remember that officer you had dinner with in Petrograd?"

"Yes," I said, "I remember, but I wasn't aware that you knew about my having dinner with him."

"Well, he is sitting in prison now."

"What for?" I asked.

"Sabotage."

When I returned from Petrograd to Moscow I told Sen Katayama that I wanted to go home. It was the beginning of April. Sen Katayama said that, as an unofficial delegate, I would be given my return fare. He was very pleased with my success and the part he had played in making it possible. He said: "I welcome all the Japanese and Chinese who come here. Some are not Communists, but I see that they are treated right, for I want to make them all Communists." He said it had been decided that I should not go back by way of Poland, since some of the delegates had had trouble in passing through. A Japanese had been put in prison and lost all his papers. It was considered better for me to go as I had come, by boat.

I bade my friends goodbye and returned to Petrograd. But the harbor was ice-locked and I had to wait six weeks before a boat could sail. I was put up in the house of the former Grand Duke Alexander, who was a patron of arts. I had the Duke's own bedroom and study, and his valet to wait on me. The valet was a nice old fellow, but he was like a ghost wandering through the palace. He lived entirely in the past and spoke of the sumptuous days in Berlin and Paris with the Grand Duke. He spoke fluently in French and English. He was shocked at the state of my wardrobe. The only thing in it that he thought fitting for a Grand Duke's closet was a fine pair of boots which had been given to me by Eugen Boissevain.

I did not like the palace rooms, especially the study. It reminded me of a cathedral altar. All the walls were rococo, carved and painted in inharmonious brick red. But the cadet who had made himself my orderly thought the rooms very grand. The cadet wanted to do everything, so I dispensed with the valet's services, but tipped him every week.

I got to know Petrograd thoroughly during those weeks. I was shown all the works, among them the great Putilov iron and steel plant and the rubber factory. I liked the visits, but I thought it must have been rather bothersome to the managers of factories who were always pestered by having to take visitors over the plants. I went down into the dungeon of the prison of Sts. Peter and Paul to see the cell in which Prince Kropotkin had been confined. I visited the Department of Nationalities, and Rayeva, the secretary, explained the status of the minority peoples under the Soviets. Also I visited the Department of Woman's Work at the Smolny Institute, where Nicolayeva, the secretary, told me all about the new regulations concerning marriage and divorce and joint individual property, and how the factory workers were cared for during the period of pregnancy and childbirth. She sent me to a meeting of enthusiastic women workers, who passed a resolution asking that a group of colored working girls visit Russia.

May Day in Petrograd was a mighty celebration of workers and soldiers and sailors. Never before or since have I seen such a demonstration. Half-empty Petrograd was filled with the shouting of millions who peopled the streets, marching and singing and holding high their red banners of hope. For hours I stood with Zinoviev and other Petrograd leaders in the reviewing stand in the Uritsky Square. And the demonstration so tremendously swept me along that after attending the People's Theater that night, I could not sleep. I sat down at the table of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexander, looking out on the Neva, with the gorgeous silver of the beautiful white night of Petrograd shining upon its face, and wrote until dawn. I was happy. Petrograd had pulled a poem out of me.

The poem was published in the Petrograd _Pravda_ and reprinted all over Russia. It was the last thing I wrote in Russia. I was overwhelmed with praise. The praise of the Communists was expected. I was their guest. But I was gratified most by the praise of the Petrograd literati. For they were a proud lot, cold or passive to the revolution. The Russian translator of Walt Whitman said that I had composed a classic. But they had it in translation. I think it should be exhibited here in the original.

_PETROGRAD: MAY DAY, 1923_

_The Neva moves majestically on,
The sun-rays playing on her breast at seven,
From her blue bosom all winter's snow-slabs gone.
Now ripples curl where yesterday lay riven
Great silver oblongs chiselled by the hand
Of Spring that bellies through Earth's happy womb,
To glad and flower the long, long pregnant land!
Where yesternight a veil of winter gloom
Shrouded the city's splendid face,--today
All life rejoices for the First of May._

_The Nevsky glows ablaze with regal Red,
Symbolic of the triumph and the rule
Of the new Power now lifting high its head
Above the place where once a sceptered fool
Was mounted by the plunderers of men
To awe the victims while they schemed and robbed.
The marchers shout again! again!! again!!!
The stones, where once the hearts of martyrs sobbed
Their blood, are sweet unto their feet today,
In celebration of the First of May._

_Cities are symbols of man's upward reach,
Man drawing near to man in close commune,
And mighty cities mighty lessons teach
Of man's decay or progress, late or soon,
And many an iron-towered Babylon,
Beneath the quiet golden breath of Time
Has vanished like the snow under the sun,
Leaving no single mark in stone or rhyme
To flame the lifted heart of man today,
As Petrograd upon the First of May._

_Oh many a thoughtful romance-seeking boy,
Slow-fingering the leaves of ancient glory,
Is stirred to rapture by the tales of Troy,
And each invigorate, vein-tingling story
Of Egypt and of Athens and of Rome,
Where slaves long toiled for knights and kings reap.
But in the years, the wondrous years to come,
The heart of youth in every land will leap
For Russia that first made national the day--The
embattled workers' day--The First of May._

_Jerusalem is fading from men's mind,
And sacred cities holding men in thrall,
Are crumbling in the new thought of mankind--The
pagan day, the holy day for all!
Oh, Petrograd, oh proud triumphant city,
The gateway to the strange, awakening East,
Where warrior-workers wrestled without pity
Against the power of magnate, monarch, priest--
World Fort of Struggle, hold from day to day
The flaming standards of the First of May!_

XX

Regarding Radical Criticism

Thus ended my adventure in Russia. This detailed account should clear up any "mystery" that is entertained about my going and remaining there. I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to write. I was not received in Russia as a politician, but primarily as a Negro poet. And the tremendous reception was a great inspiration and urge to write more. I often felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet altogether out of proportion to my actual performance. And thus I was fired with the desire to accomplish the utmost.

Excepting for the handicap of lack of money, there was nothing to side-track me from my purpose. I had no radical party affiliations, and there was no reason why I should consider myself under any special obligations to the Communists. I had not committed myself to anything. I had remained a free agent.

But recently in an issue of _The New Masses_, the literary organ of the American Communists, I was singled out for a special attack in an article about Negro novelists. The article, under the guise of a critique, was merely a piece of personal spite and slander.

I take these extracts from that article: (1) I had "written an indignant poem, attacking lynching, wholly lacking in working-class content." (2) I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." (3) "The retired radical had grown fat and ill and indifferent in Paris."

Against the Communist attack my poem still remains my strong defense:

_IF WE MUST DIE_

_If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, Oh let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!_

_Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!_

First published in Max Eastman's magazine _The Liberator_, the poem was reprinted in every Negro publication of any consequence. It forced its way into the Negro pulpit (a most interesting phenomenon for this black heretic). Ministers ended their sermons with it, and the congregations responded, Amen. It was repeated in Negro clubs and Negro schools and at Negro mass meetings. To thousands of Negroes who are not trained to appreciate poetry, "If We Must Die" makes me a poet. I myself was amazed at the general sentiment for the poem. For I am so intensely subjective as a poet, that I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.

The critic also asserted that my novel, _Home to Harlem_, had no "class-conscious action." When Jake in _Home to Harlem_ refused to scab, wasn't that class-conscious? And when he refused to pimp, didn't he demonstrate a high sense of social propriety? Perhaps a higher sense than many of us critical scribblers.

I did not come to the knowing of Negro workers in an academic way, by talking to black crowds at meetings, nor in a bohemian way, by talking about them in cafés. I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city by working with him as a porter and longshoreman and as waiter on the railroad. I lived in the same quarters and we drank and caroused together in bars and at rent parties. So when I came to write about the low-down Negro, I did not have to compose him from an outside view. Nor did I have to write a pseudo-romantic account, as do bourgeois persons who become working-class for awhile and work in shops and factories to get material for writing dull books about workers, whose inner lives are closed to them.

I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish. If the Communists can create a Negro casual better than Jake in _Home to Harlem_--a man who works, lives and loves lustily and even thinks a little for himself, why in the infernal regions don't they?

Jake leaves Europe for America and Harlem and swings through the Black Belt with a clean manly stride. The Communist critic states that the story of Jake was autobiographical, "dilating upon my own love life." The peeping critic seems to know more about my love life than I do myself. Perhaps it is necessary to inform him that I have not lived without some experience. And I have never wanted to lie about life, like the preaching black prudes wrapped up in the borrowed robes of hypocritical white respectability. I am entirely un-obsessed by sex. I am not an imitator of Anglo-Saxon prudery in writing. I haven't arrived at that high degree of civilized culture where I can make a success of producing writing carefully divorced from reality. Yet I couldn't indulge in such self-flattery as to claim Jake in _Home to Harlem_ as a portrait of myself. My damned white education has robbed me of much of the primitive vitality, the pure stamina, the simple unswaggering strength of the Jakes of the Negro race.

The critic declares that I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." The statement is untrue, but perhaps truth is not vital to the new criticism that they say must replace the old.

Perhaps the Communist critic, who may be closer to the sources of information than others, may have some inside knowledge of just what exhausted me in Soviet Russia. Of course, I had a hell-raising good time in Russia. I was constantly occupied in visiting factories and all kinds of institutions, making speeches and writing, besides enjoying the relaxation of cabarets and parties. Perhaps I was fatigued, as any person is likely to be after a passionate spell of any great thing. But as for my being exhausted--hell! It is fifteen years since then, and I am still going strong, if the head-in-the-butt Communist critic doesn't know. Exhausted indeed!

I came out of Russia with my head on my shoulders and my pen in my pocket and determined to write at all costs, so long as I had a piece of bread to bite and a room in which I could think and scribble. And in ten years I wrote five books and many poems. Perhaps too many!

I never thought there was anything worth while for me in the bohemian glamor of Montparnasse. "The sidewalk cafés of Montmartre" held no special attraction for me. Attractive as Paris is, I have never stayed there for a considerable length of time. The longest period was over three months, when I was in a hospital. Montmartre I visited when I was invited by generous Americans who had money to treat themselves and their friends to a hectic time. The Montmartre of the cabarets and music halls never excited me. It is so obviously a place where the very formal French allow foreigners who can pay to cut up informally. It has no character of its own. Paris, away from Montmartre and Montparnasse, seemed to me to be the perfect city of modern civilization. It was the only city I knew which provided quiet and comfortable clubs in the form of cafés for all of its citizens of every class. I appreciated, but was not specially enamored of Paris, perhaps because I have never had the leisure necessary to make an excellent clubman. If I had to live in France, I would prefer life among the fisherfolk of Douarnenez, or in the city of Strassburg, or in sinister Marseilles, or any of the coast towns of the department of the Var.

The Communist critic further states that I "had grown fat, and ill, and indifferent in Paris...." I regret that here I am obliged to become clinical. But the clinic is an important department of life, and the fact about it is that I got _well_ instead of _ill_ in Paris.

In 1922 I left America in perfect health and more completely whole than the day on which I was born. My first accident of illness occurred in Russia. Sanitary conditions were not ideal in Petrograd and Moscow in 1922. No intelligent person expected them to be after eight years of unremitting international war, revolution and civil war. I remember that every time I received my linen from the laundry I invariably found lice in it. The linen itself was very clean. But the revolution, sweeping away the privileged classes, also had carried along most of their servants. And of the peasants fresh from the country who replaced them, many were neither competent nor clean.

It was very near the end of my visit that I experienced a sort of deadness in my left side and once my face gradually became puffed up like an enormous chocolate soufflé. I have photographs in my possession, taken in Moscow, which authenticate my condition at the time. There was also an American acquaintance who was unable to turn his head; it was cocked stiff to one side like a macabre caricature, as if it were skewered to his shoulder. I consulted a doctor. He thought the climate had affected me and advised me to get heavy woolen underwear. Later, in Petrograd, I became quite ill and had a tooth extracted for the first time in my life, under the most painful conditions.

I arrived in Germany in the early summer of 1923. Three months spent there were an interval of intermittent fevers and headaches. It was hard labor to concentrate upon a series of articles about Russia for a Negro magazine. In the late fall I arrived in Paris. I consulted a French specialist, who advised me to enter a hospital immediately. While I was convalescing in the hospital I wrote this poem, "The Desolate City." The poem was largely symbolic: a composite evocation of the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.

_THE DESOLATE CITY_

_My spirit is a pestilential city, With misery triumphant everywhere, Glutted with baffled hopes and human pity. Strange agonies make quiet lodgement there: Its sewers bursting ooze up from below And spread their loathsome substance through its lanes, Flooding all areas with their evil flow And blocking all the motions of its veins: Its life is sealed to love or hope or pity, My spirit is a pestilential city._

_Above its walls the air is heavy-wet, Brooding in fever mood and hanging thick Round empty tower and broken minaret, Settling upon the tree tops stricken sick And withered under its contagious breath. Their leaves are shrivelled silver, parched decay, Like wilting creepers trailing underneath The chalky yellow of a tropic way. Round crumbling tower and leaning minaret, The air hangs fever-filled and heavy-wet._

_And all its many fountains no more spurt; Within the damned-up tubes they tide and foam, Around the drifted sludge and silted dirt, And weep against the soft and liquid loam. And so the city's ways are washed no more, All is neglected and decayed within, Clean waters beat against its high-walled shore In furious force, but cannot enter in: The suffocated fountains cannot spurt, They foam and rage against the silted dirt._

_Beneath the ebon gloom of mounting rocks The little pools lie poisonously still, And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks, And utter sudden, plaintive notes and shrill, Pecking at strangely gray-green substances; But never do they dip their bills and drink. They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees, And fretfully flit to and from the brink, In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks, Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks._

_And green-eyed moths of curious design, With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted, On nests of flowers among those rocks recline, Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted, But breathing deadly poison from their lips. And every lovely moth that wanders by, And of the blossoms fatal nectar sips, Is doomed to drooping stupor, there to die; All green-eyed moths of curious design That on the fiercely-burning blooms recline._

_Oh cold as death is all the loveliness, That breathes out of the strangeness of the scene, And sickening like a skeleton's caress, Of clammy clinging fingers, long and lean. Above it float a host of yellow flies, Circling in changeless motion in their place, That came down snow-thick from the freighted skies, Swarming across the gluey floor of space: Oh cold as death is all the loveliness, And sickening like a skeleton's caress._

_There was a time, when, happy with the birds, The little children clapped their hands and laughed; And midst the clouds the glad winds heard their words And blew down all the merry ways to waft The music through the scented fields of flowers. Oh sweet were children's voices in those days, Before the fall of pestilential showers, That drove them forth far from the city's ways: Now never, nevermore their silver words Will mingle with the golden of the birds._

_Gone, gone forever the familiar forms To which the city once so dearly clung, Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms And lost away like lovely songs unsung. Yet life still lingers, questioningly strange, Timid and quivering, naked and alone, Against the cycle of disruptive change, Though all the fond familiar forms are gone, Forever gone, the fond familiar forms; Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms._

More than three years after "The Desolate City" was written, it was published for the first time in the Negro magazine, _Opportunity_. But by then I was a stout black animal, splashing and floating in the blue Mediterranean. The French specialist had said: "You are young, with a very wonderful constitution, and you will recover all right if you will live quietly and carefully away from the temptations of the big cities." I certainly did follow that good advice.