What Destinies confer, And laughing mock LaSalle, his dreamings stir To wander here, depart The fortress of Creve Coeur, Of broken heart, For this fort of Starved Rock? After the heart is broken then the cliff Where vultures flock; And where below its steeps the savage skiff Cuts with a pitiless knife the rope let down For water. From the earth this Indian town Vanished and on this Rock the Illini Thirsting, their buckets taken with the knife, Lay down to die. * * * * * This is the land where every generation Lets down its buckets for the water of Life. We are the children and the epigone Of the Illini, the vanished nation. And this starved scarp of stone Is now the emblem of our tribulation, The inverted cup of our insatiable thirst, The Illini by fate accursed, This land lost to the Pottawatomies, They lost the land to us, Who baffled and idolatrous, And thirsting, spurred by hope Kneel upon aching knees, And with our eager hands draw up the bucketless rope. * * * * * This is the tragic, the symbolic face, Le Rocher or Starved Rock, Round which the eternal turtles drink and swim And serpents green and strange, As race comes after race, War after war. This is the sphinx whose Memnon lips breathe dirges To empire's wayward star, And over the race's restless urges, Whose lips unlock Life's secret which is vanishment and change. HYMN TO THE DEAD O, you who have gone from the ways of cities, From the peopled places, the streets of strife, From offices, markets, rooms, retreats, Pastoral ways, hamlets, everywhere from the earth, And have made of the emptiness of your departure A land, a country, a realm all your own, Set above the hills of our vision, an empire Within, around, above our empire of days, Of pain and clamorous tongues; An empire which out of a sovereign silence Stretches its power over the restless multitude Of our thoughts, and the ceaseless music of our beings, And surrounds us even as the air we breathe-- O ye majestic Dead, hear our hymn! * * * * *