Indictment on Evidence
Bruce Douglas, nephew to a Scottish Earl,
Sat in the City Prison, low in heart
And spirits. Round him lay the forms of men—
Men of the people, of ignoble birth—
Prone or supine in sleep; but sleep and he
Were out: the Douglas was too drunk for sleep.
And so he sat and moaned; and still his moan
Had all the cadences and stops of song—
Recurrent swells and measured silences
Which sought the ear as ocean’s billows roll,
At even spaces and with matching speed,
One after one ashore. Wherefore uprose
An old gray constable who in the morn
And blossom of his life had courted fame
As horse-reporter for a public print,
And so was skilled in letters, and he spake,
There to the sergeant, saying: “Surely, now,
The man’s a poet. In his moan I hear
The pulsing and the passion of the sea—
Hear the far beating of the waterfall,
Throbbing of noon-day insects in the grass—
All rhythmic movements of the universe
Which poets echo in their thought and speech,
Even in their inarticulate complaints
Of pain. My life I’ll hazard that the man’s
A bard disguised to look a gentleman.”
So, bringing his effects, which had till then
Lain unconsidered—from his pockets plucked
And tossed aside—all curiously they
Explored the papers. Odes and odes there were,
And every ode in praise of some fair scene
In a fair land; and the fair land was this
Our California. From the snowy peaks
That glitter in the skies of Siskiyou,
Down to the golden margin where the land
Slips underneath the San Diegan bay;
And from the dim Sierra, far across
To where old Ocean bears upon his breast
The Mongol horde returning to its own,
Its native land and its dear household gods,
Bruce Douglas, nephew of a Scottish Earl,
Had sung the beauty of the Golden State!
So then the Clerk, splitting the Book of Doom,
Charged him therein with murder, arson, rape,
Theft, libel, mayhem and intent to leave
The State and so defraud his creditors—
With vagrancy, extortion and assault
Felonious, obtaining cash by false
Pretenses—with infanticide—even him,
Bruce Douglas, nephew of a Scottish Earl.