MISSISSIPPI RIVER

Stephen Vincent Benet

Solo 1: Far north, far north are the sources of the Mississippi

All: The headwaters, the cold lakes,

Solo 1: By the little sweet-tasting brooks of the blond country,

All: The country of snow and wheat,

Solo 1: Or west among the black mountains,

All: the glacial springs

Solo 1: Far north and west they lie and few come to them,

few taste them, but, day and night they flow south.

Solo 2: By the French grave and Indian,

All: steadily flowing,

Solo 3: By the forgotten camps of the broken heart,

Solo 1: By the countries of black earth, fertile, and yellow

earth and red earth,

All: A growing, a swelling torrent:

Solo 1: Rivers meet it, and tiny rivulets, meet it, stain it,

Solo 4: Great rivers, rivers of pride, come bowing their

Watery heads like muddy gift-bearers,

All: bringing their secret burdens.

Solo 1: Rivers from the high horse-plains and the deep, green

Eastern pastures sink into it and are lost and rejoice

and shout with it, shout within it,

All: They and their secret gifts,

Solo 5: A fleck of gold from Montana,

Solo 6: A sliver of steel from Pittsburgh,

Solo 7: A wheat-grain from Minnesota,

Solo 8: An apple-blossom from Tennessee,

Solo 1: Rolled, mixed with the mud and earth of the changing

bottoms of the vast, rending floods,

But rolling, rolling from Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa,

Rolling from Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois,

All: Rolling and shouting!

Solo 1: Till, at last, it is the Mississippi,

(Song: “Old Man River”)

Solo 9: The father of waters:

Solo 10: the matchless;

Solo 11: the great flood dyed with the earth of States;

Solo 12: with the dust and the sun and the seed of half the

states,

Solo 1: The huge heart-vein, pulsing and pulsing; gigantic;

ever broader, ever mightier

Solo 13: It rolls past broken landings and camellia-smelling

woods;

Solo 14: strange birds fly over it;

Solo 1: It rolls to the blue Gulf; ocean; and the painted

birds fly.

Solo 15: The grey moss mixed with it,

Solo 16: the hawk’s feather has fallen in it,

Solo 17: The cardinal feather,

Solo 18: the feather of the small thrush singing spring

to New England,

Solo 19: the apple-pip,

Solo 20: and the pepper-seed,

Solo 21: and the checkerberry,

Solo 1: And always the water flowing, earthy, majestic,

Fed with snow and heat, dew and moonlight,

All: Always the wide, sure water,

Solo 1: Over the rotted deer-horn, the gold, Spanish money,

The long-rusted iron of many undertakings,

Over DeSoto’s bones and Joliet’s wonder,

And the long forest-years before them, the brief years after,

The broad flood, the eternal motion, the restless-hearted

Always, forever,

All: Mississippi, the god!

(Song: “Old Man River”)