The Red Son
The Red Son - context Summary
Published in 1916 Chicago Poems
Written for the 1916 collection Chicago Poems, this piece dramatizes a speaker’s break from rural roots toward urban ambition. The voice acknowledges home comforts and kinship but answers an inner, restless drive that compels travel, struggle, and personal risk in the city. The poem frames the departure as inevitable rather than moral failure, presenting migration and contest with modern life as a natural, solemn choice shaped by experience and aspiration.
Read Complete AnalysesI love your faces I saw the many years I drank your milk and filled my mouth With your home talk, slept in your house And was one of you. But a fire burns in my heart. Under the ribs where pulses thud And flitting between bones of skull Is the push, the endless mysterious command, Saying: "I leave you behind-- You for the little hills and the years all alike, You with your patient cows and old houses Protected from the rain, I am going away and I never come back to you; Crags and high rough places call me, Great places of death Where men go empty handed And pass over smiling To the star-drift on the horizon rim. My last whisper shall be alone, unknown; I shall go to the city and fight against it, And make it give me passwords Of luck and love, women worth dying for, And money. I go where you wist not of Nor I nor any man nor woman. I only know I go to storms Grappling against things wet and naked." There is no pity of it and no blame. None of us is in the wrong. After all it is only this: You for the little hills and I go away.
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