Produced by A LightThe Chinese Nightingale and Other PoemsbyVachel LindsayNicholas Vachel Lindsay Illinois Poet  18791931Note on text  Italicized words or phrases capitalizedItalicized stanzas are indented 5 spaces  Some errors have beencorrected  Lines longer than 78 characters are broken accordingto metre and the continuation is indented two spacesThe Chinese Nightingale and Other PoemsByVachel LindsayAuthor of The Congo General William Booth Enters Into HeavenAdventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty etcThis Book is Dedicated to Sara Teasdale Poet  Harriet Monroe awarded the Levinson Prize to The Chinese Nightingale  as the best contribution to Poetry  A Magazine of Verse  for the year 1915Table of Contents    First Section  The Chinese Nightingale    Second Section  America Watching the War August 1914 to April 1917  Where Is the Real Nonresistant  Heres to the Mice  When Bryan Speaks  To Jane Addams at the Hague     I  Speak Now for Peace    II  Tolstoi Is Plowing Yet  The Tale of the Tiger Tree  The Merciful Hand    Third Section  America at War with Germany Beginning April 1917  Our Mother Pocahontas  Concerning Emperors  Niagara  Mark Twain and Joan of Arc  The Bankrupt Peace Maker  This My Song is made for Kerensky    Fourth Section  Tragedies Comedies and Dreams  Our Guardian Angels and Their Children  Epitaphs for Two Players     I  Edwin Booth    II  John Bunny Motion Picture Comedian  Mae Marsh Motion Picture Actress  Two Old Crows  The Drunkards Funeral  The Raft  The Ghosts of the Buffaloes  The Broncho that Would Not Be Broken  The Prairie Battlements  The Flower of Mending  Alone in the Wind on the Prairie  To Lady Jane  How I Walked Alone in the Jungles of Heaven    Fifth Section  The Poem Games  An Account of the Poem Games  The King of Yellow Butterflies  The Potatoes Dance  The Booker Washington Trilogy     I  Simon Legree    II  John Brown   III  King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba  How Samson Bore Away the Gates of GazaThe Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems    First Section  The Chinese Nightingale  A Song in Chinese Tapestries  How how he said  Friend Chang I said  San Francisco sleeps as the dead  Ended license lust and play  Why do you iron the night away  Your big clock speaks with a deadly sound  With a tick and a wail till dawn comes round  While the monster shadows glower and creep  What can be better for man than sleep  I will tell you a secret Chang replied  My breast with vision is satisfied  And I see green trees and fluttering wings  And my deathless bird from Shanghai sings  Then he lit five firecrackers in a pan  Pop pop said the firecrackers cracracrack  He lit a joss stick long and black  Then the proud gray joss in the corner stirred  On his wrist appeared a gray small bird  And this was the song of the gray small bird  Where is the princess loved forever  Who made Chang first of the kings of men  And the joss in the corner stirred again  And the carved dog curled in his arms awoke  Barked forth a smokecloud that whirled and broke  It piled in a maze round the ironingplace  And there on the snowy table wide  Stood a Chinese lady of high degree  With a scornful witching tearose face  Yet she put away all form and pride  And laid her glimmering veil aside  With a childlike smile for Chang and for me  The walls fell back night was aflower  The table gleamed in a moonlit bower  While Chang with a countenance carved of stone  Ironed and ironed all alone  And thus she sang to the busy man Chang  Have you forgotten  Deep in the ages long long ago  I was your sweetheart there on the sand  Stormworn beach of the Chinese land  We sold our grain in the peacock town  Built on the edge of the seasands brown  Built on the edge of the seasands brown  When all the world was drinking blood  From the skulls of men and bulls  And all the world had swords and clubs of stone  We drank our tea in China beneath the sacred spicetrees  And heard the curled waves of the harbor moan  And this gray bird in Loves first spring  With a brightbronze breast and a bronzebrown wing  Captured the world with his carolling  Do you remember ages after  At last the world we were born to own  You were the heir of the yellow throne  The world was the field of the Chinese man  And we were the pride of the Sons of Han  We copied deep books and we carved in jade  And wove blue silks in the mulberry shade  I remember I remember  That Spring came on forever  That Spring came on forever  Said the Chinese nightingale  My heart was filled with marvel and dream  Though I saw the western streetlamps gleam  Though dawn was bringing the western day  Though Chang was a laundryman ironing away  Mingled there with the streets and alleys  The railroadyard and the clocktower bright  Demon clouds crossed ancient valleys  Across wide lotusponds of light  I marked a giant fireflys flight