Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BAD LANDS, by ROY LESLIE HERRICK


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BAD LANDS, by                    
First Line: They call them the bad lands, these
Last Line: The awesome building of a world.
Subject(s): Landscape


They call them the Bad Lands, these.
A nation's wonderland, where lies
Revealed the life of ages gone,
Of life that walks the earth no more.
Gigantic things—titanothere,
The ancient tiger, saber-toothed,
A beast that makes the Bengal brute
Seem dwarf; the three-toed horse
That loped his rabbit length along
An eerie landscape; the camel, too,
But seen in strange and pygmy form;
The midget deer, and Oreodon;
A world of weird and monstrous things,
The seeming product of some phantasy—
All these have left their bones to tell
The story of that long dead day.

They call them Bad Lands, these.
A world of battlements and towers;
Of nature's castles, wonder-hued;
Of statue, pinnacle, and peak;
Of chaos high on chaos piled,
And miles of faultless order laid;
A dreary, glaring, ghastly waste,
And plains like Eden's garden clad;
Of canyon depths that might have been
Dark-shadowed oft by demon forms;
And vistas near that almost seem
To bear the prints of angels' wings.
It seems a land unfinished, held
A lesson for the speeding centuries,
To picture to the multitudes
The awesome building of a world.





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