As Mr. Spock might say, “Fascinating!”

Here is a little light reading for the day after Earth Day, a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet called By the Waters of Babylon.

Believe it or not, Benet wrote it way back in 1937.

Read it, and wonder, and weep.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

This funny-looking, odd little man was proof of the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” long before anyone had heard of Susan Boyle.

This funny-looking, odd little man was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist who was born in 1898 and died in 1943. His name is Stephen Vincent Benét.

He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1929 for John Brown’s Body, his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, and the other, posthumously, in 1944 for Western Star, an unfinished poem on the settling of America. Two of his short stories are also very well known, The Devil and Daniel Webster, which won an O. Henry Award, and By the Waters of Babylon.

My favorite composition of his, however, is the poem “American Names”.


American Names
by Stephen Vincent Benét

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.


I want to thank my English blogger friend, Yorkshire Pudding, another funny-looking, odd little man whose actual name I still do not know, for having inspired this post.