Tuesday
Yesterday President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, described by the White House as “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness.” To celebrate, here’s a poem by Tennessee poet Will Allen Dromgoole,” who lived at a time (1860-1934) when such poems were regularly published in daily newspapers and when, as a result, poetry enjoyed a much higher readership than it does today.
The poem is somewhat hokey–Dromgoole sounds like she churned out poetry by the barrel, writing over 8000 poems in her lifetime–but it has a nice sentiment to it, very much in the spirit of Biden’s accomplishment. It shows how popular poetry–which is to say, poetry that could be understood by just about anyone–contributed to America’s civic religion in the early 20th century. The central tenet of that religion was that people should care more about the good of society and about future generations than about themselves.
Given that the poem is about building bridges, it also reminds us that America used to be more optimistic about its future. It used to have less difficulty imagining grand construction projects.
The Bridge Builder
By Will Allen Dromgoole
An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”
