Barnard College - Mortarboard Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 8 text:

To Dr. John A. Kouwenhoven — Who has shown us that in such diverse things as a milling machine, Jefferson ' s Monticello, New Orleans Jazz, Tom Sawyer, a comic strip, New York ' s skyscrapers, we may see a phenomenon truly American. — Who has more than anyone we know answered the question What is America?

Page 10 text:

FOREWORD 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 so 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 hunstmen 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 toward the ore And the cheap car, parked by the station-door. Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes, And you are ruined gardens in the South And bleak New England farms, wo winter-white Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep The middle grainland where the wind of night Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep. A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag. And now to see you is more difficult yet Except as an immensity of sheel Made up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweat And glittering with the heat of ladled steel. All these you are, and each is partly you, And none is false, and none is wholly true. For as we hunt you down, you must escape And we pursue a shadow of our own That can be caught in a magician ' s cape But has the flatness of a painted stone. Never the running stag, the gull at wing, The pure elixir, the American thing. 6