Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SONGS OF NEW SWEDEN: 11. INDIAN ROCK: WISSAHICKON, by ARTHUR PETERSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SONGS OF NEW SWEDEN: 11. INDIAN ROCK: WISSAHICKON, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Far from the troubled city's sights and sounds
Last Line: Of these fair hills and vales and streams, so long their right.
Subject(s): Native Americans; Indians Of America; American Indians; Indians Of South America


Far from the troubled city's sights and sounds,
I lay upon a rock in dreamful mood;
Where voice of man the silence seldom wounds,
And flows the Wissahickon's winding flood.
Round me the green-leafed forest seemed to brood.
And on the rock, facing the golden west,
The figure of an Indian, carved of wood,
With bow in hand, and like a warrior drest,
Stood, gazing o'er the vales lying beneath at rest.

The sunset streamed upon him: round the rock
The warm light lay, and lit the gap, and shot
Long lances in the wood on bush and stock.
He stood as in the days which now are not,
Of mighty hunts, and tourneys long and hot,
And seeming almost human in the glow,
Aye, superhuman, in that heaven his lot
Of fierce, accoutred ghosts who, to and fro,
Chase ever over mystic hills the antlered foe.

A legend of a time of dwindling tribes,
And dying camp-fires up and down the land,
And loss of all the savage mind imbibes
As dearest, and the flight of many a band
Toward prairie vast, or distant desert's sand:
Of spiritless hunts by broken-hearted men
Who, hunting, stopped and pressed with sullen hand
The branches back, and saw the stranger's den,
Then quickly sought their native wilderness again.

Here, through the early twilight of the wood,
Followed by braves who loved the green oak tree,
And, after intervals, by more, who stood
About the place, all waiting silently,
Came he, the king, who felt the breezes free
Blow from the sunset o'er lands once for him,
Proud chieftain of the Lenni-Lenape,
And went up on the rock, from spaces dim,
Into a place sun-lit, nor masked by bush nor limb.

The forest of his fathers slumbered round him,
And far below the waters met his gaze
Of Wissahickon, that sweet stream which bound him
Unto her like her child: down the steep maze
Looking, through branches of the oak, and sprays
Of ancient hemlock, tipped with summer green,
He saw the river of his boyhood days:
Gently he saw her flow and then, unseen
Awhile, run out, and far away, long hills between.

The dying sun burned on his swarthy face,
Then sank and left him, standing stern and still,
Like that red figure which, in this lone place,
Now broods and watches, set by some kind skill.
Behind, in groups upon the wooded hill,
With war-paint painted, and for battle drest,
His braves, long-limbed; and there the women fill
A verdant niche, and with the children rest --
Last remnant of the tribe to seek the boundless West.

The chieftain turned, the vales looked up and saw
His figure moving from them mournfully.
A new moon glittered on his hatchet's claw,
Then kissed the crag where ne'er again stands he.
They rose, his band of Lenni-Lenape,
They followed him, they crossed the woods by night,
In single, silent file like ghosts that flee;
They disappeared for ever from the sight
Of these fair hills and vales and streams, so long their right.





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