Ends the play--for what is life but dying? What is love but fire forever crying? What your soul but love's pure carbon fuel? Love and life make ashes of the jewel! CHICAGO I On the gray paper of this mist and fog With dust for the erasure and with smoke For drawing crayons, be this charcoal scrawl: The breed of Gog in the kingdom of Magog, Skyscrapers, helmeted, stand sentinel Amid the obscuring fumes of coal and coke, Raised by enchantment out of the sand and bog. This sky-line, the Sierras of the lake, Cuts with dulled teeth, Which twist and break, The imponderable and drifting steam. And restlessly beneath This man-created mountain chain, Like the flow of a prairie river Endlessly by day and night, forever Along the boulevards pedestrians stream In a shuffle like dancers to a low refrain: Forever by day and night Pursuing as of old the lure of delight, And the ghosts of pleasure or pain. Their rhythmic feet sound like the falling of rain, Or the hush of the waves, when the roar Is blown by a wind off shore. II From a tower like a mountain promontory The cesspool of a railroad lies to view Fouling the marble of the city's glory: A crapulous sluice of garbage and of cars Where engines rush and whistle, smudge the blue With filth like the trail of slugs. It is a trench of steel which bars Free access to the common shore, and hugs In a coil of lazar arms the boulevard. Cattle and hogs delivered here for slaughter Corrupt the loveliness of the water front. They low and grunt, Switched back and forth within the tangled yard. But from this tower the amethystine water, The water of jade or slate, Is visible with its importunate Gestures against the sky to still retreats In Michigan, of quiet woods and hills Beyond the simmering passion of these streets, And all their endless ills.... III