City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,

Shoveling,

Wrecking,

Planning,

Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Halsted Street Car

Come you, cartoonists,

Hang on a strap with me here

At seven o’clock in the morning

On a Halsted street car.

Take your pencils

And draw these faces.

Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,

That pig-sticker in one corner—his mouth—

That overall factory girl—her loose cheeks.

Find for your pencils

A way to mark your memory

Of tired empty faces.

After their night’s sleep,

In the moist dawn

And cool daybreak,

Faces

Tired of wishes,

Empty of dreams.

The Workingmen

In the dusk of the dawn they go

A hundred thousand feet sluffing the sidewalks

Setting a dull-rumbling hum up the streets of the city.

Fish Crier

I know a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in January.

He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing.

His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to whom he may call his wares from a pushcart.

Muckers

Twenty men stand watching the muckers.

Stabbing the sides of the ditch

Where clay gleams yellow,

Driving the blades of their shovels

Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains,

Wiping sweat off their faces

With red bandanas.

The muckers work on . . . pausing . . . to pull

Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh.