Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)

In progress

I subscribe to Academy of American Poets service where they send to my email a poem a day. Upon receiving this one today (August 2,2025) I was taken by the irrepressible rhythm and chant of it, and its perfect flight of imagination with surprising insight.

Meeting Ourselves by Vachel Lindsay

We met ourselves as we came back
As we hiked the trail from the north.
Our foot-prints mixed in the rainy path
Coming back and going forth.
The prints of my comrade’s hob-nailed shoes
And my tramp show more shoes mixed in the rain.
We had climbed for days and days to the North
And this was the sum of our gain:
We met ourselves as we came back,
And were happy in mist and rain.
Our old souls and our new souls
Met to salute and explain—
That a day shall be as a thousand years,
And a thousand years as a day.
The powers of a thousand dreaming skies
As we shouted along the trail of surprise
Were gathered in our play:
The purple skies of the South and the North,
The crimson skies of the South and the North,
Of tomorrow and yesterday.

Turns out this poem was published in the 1920s and was written for "precocious children twelve or fifty years of age." I'm 66 now and cannot be precocious child, unless one can be belatedly precocious in one's second childhood. It's the kind of poem I could learn by heart and, at some odd opportunity, lift a line or two to sum up the occasion or to rally prevailing emotions. I rushed to find where I could read more and was again delighted when I read the book's title.

I am going to have a lot of fun with this one. Yeah, "poetry" and "fun," imagine! show less

The poems are often musical in nature, often meant to be sung. They sometimes come across as collegiate cheers and other times as lullabies. The ethnic stereotypes are dated and might raise an eyebrow. The ethnic caricatures often take away from the poems in which they feature. I'm not sure the America portrayed within these pages ever existed; it most certainly no longer does.

This poet uses words to beat you around the head with a stick. His ideas are the ideological Christian-pacifist of the early 1900s. Women and the "savage peoples" are the idyll of nature. I felt most of the poems about "savage peoples" were patronizing.

There is much to be said for dismissing this poem as too racist to read. However, if you can get through that, it has one redeeming feature which is the use of African American and jazz rhythms and tunes as an underlying score for the poem. There is a recording of Lindsay reading it, so we know exactly how he intended to it to be read.