11 Riley Bio

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.COM

"Where we celebrate the child in us all"

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT
by Thomas Earl Williams with primary illustrations by Katherine Kuonen and the great assistance of Robert Tinsley with Riley artifacts, Copyright, 1997, Thomas Earl Williams

When Riley slipped down the stairs from his father's law office having decided to skip out "for his own reasons", he observed Dr. Townsend at the town square bowing and introducing himself on a little back platform, stet‑

son hat lifted, frock coat flapping and hair and beard trimmed to make him appear like a double to General U.S. Grant. Behind him were three young men wearing linen dusters each playing two musical instruments playing martial music interspersed with loud organ recitals of hymns from an organ within the wagon. That night a "free concert" was promised "at early- candlelite." Riley talked his way into this crew and left Greenfield with "the glittering cavalcade" without saying good-bye to anybody.

The Wizard Oil Co. left Greenfield for Fortville and places beyond with Riley on board and several young men. The boys laughed at his stories and enjoyed his drawing, calling him "Little Man." He taught them new songs and did blackboard illustrations for Doc Townsend who he called "Doxy." The Wizard Oil co. boys arrived in town about noon announcing their presence with great showers of music. Then the boys would distribute handbills and Doc Townsend would lecture on his medicines afternoon and evening. In the evenings, by torchlights, Riley would entertain too. He did original recitations, impersonations, and readings of poetry. When there was a week-long county fair, the Wizard boys would stay in town the whole week and participate in the parades and fair entertainments. The boys being exciting and mysterious vagabonds had many girls chasing them. Riley's depression about Greenfield was lifted. A "rainbow" was in the sky. The times were never dull. By October the group reached Lima, Ohio, where Townsend resided and kept his laboratory. The group made Lima the center for the last flings around Ohio before winter set in. Riley made many friendships and was invited often to read his poems. While Townsend spent the days making his medicines, Riley was living in the Townsend home and preparing new advertising. Riley kept no regular schedule. He is remembered by the child of Doc Townsend as studying Buckles' HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION and deToqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA during this period. A few weeks before Christmas, Riley decided to return back home to Greenfield.

During the "dark half of 1875 after Riley "ran" from the Kemmer lynching, Riley wrote relatively little poetry. Nellie's departure from Greenfield as well as his own were horribly wrenching events. He escaped from Crestillomeem with Doc Townsend and his ridiculous "patent medicine"

While James Whitcomb Riley was on the run from Greenfield, his mind yet returned to his life there. Here is a letter Riley wrote to his equally mischievous friend, John Skinner from Lima, Ohio October 7, 1875 during this "dark half' of the year of the Kemmer lynching: "After my long waiting your letter came at last "I tho't this place without an equal in regard to its "increase in crime", but I must knock under for the present to old Greenfield. A saloon keeper was shot here last week and no particular stir made about it, nor the man missed...Day before yesterday we were furnished an entire 'change of program' by our funny man -the one you know. They had a warrant for him and he run (sic) like a little man-the whole town ran after him. They wore him out at last and bro't him up a-standin'". He had seduced a girl here - a Miss Vananda - and not having compromise money enough, or a hankering after prison wall -he did what he ought to have been man enough to do without compulsion -married her. She is fifteen and he eighteen and both in the family way. By the way there is a slashin' lot of girls here, and they do hold a man off too "party". I have only made the acquaintance of two or three, and they're the very ones I didn't care to know, but I will make it Hot for 'em shortly: I'm handling "wires" now that'll fetch 'ern. "Confound my time" "I stand in" with the best men of the town, and am rapidly growing in public favor - I'll be out in hook form yet. I wish you were here to room with me at the bobbiest little boarding house in the world - everything is perfect even to the old girl, "the hostess." She wears a crutch, but I don't know how many of her legs are off. She capers under the jocund patronymic of "Aunt Jane" - everybody calls her that, so if she Aunt Jane who is she? Speaking of Boarding

Houses - how's the Test House? I would like to strike old 13 to-night with its exchanged bed - I need something of that kind now, but I shall not excite your sensitive nature with visions of "sweet faces, rounded arms and bosoms prest to little harps of gold" not waken in the drowsy channels of your inmost soul, the fire of "Kisses sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

To Mrs. Test give my especial regards, and thank her for remembering me so kindly. Tell Minnie I could be happy once again could I hear her one plaintive melody. I think of you often, and of the rare old times we had, and I still nurse a hope that we may have a grand Rehearsal of them again. Say to Angie that she haunts me (a casual romantic interest)..." Yours truly, Jim Give my love to George and Nell - not forgetting Jesse and Nett.

after the Kemmer hanging. Riley was never far from newspaper reporting. Earlier in the year that Kemmer was hung Riley had edited and contributed to the Greenfield COMMERCIAL and NEWS. After those newspapers folded, Riley did occasional assignments for what had been the rival newspaper, the Hancock DEMOCRAT. Minnie Belle Mitchell, wife of its later editor, recalled, Riley spending hours in the office of the Hancock DEMOCRAT where William Mitchell, the kindly old editor, sensing Riley's genius, would share with him a corner to write. The editor gave him assignments such as reporting current events or social events or writing advertisements for the local columns. Sometimes these would end up "rhymed."

One can imagine that Riley may have contributed or written the Hancock DEMOCRAT article detailing the events of the lynching of Kemmer. If he witnessed the events, he might have lived precariously. The perpetrators would have known his name. When other detailed versions of the incident

- less favorable to the action - began being leaked to other newspapers, Riley might well have felt the heat of suspicion directed at him.

At first he admits "dying of loneliness" striking Fortville after he joined the group at Greenfield. He must have had to leave very quickly and desperately. Then things changed for the better.

"I am having first rate times considering the boys I am with - they, you know, are hardly my kind, but they are pleasant and agreeable...We sing along the road when we tire of talking, and when we tire of that and the scenery, we lay ourselves along the seats and "dream the happy hours away", as blissfully as the time-honored "baby in the sugar trough." "I made myself thoroughly solid with "Doxy" (a playful patronymic I have given the proprietor) by introducing a blackboard system of advertising, which promises to be the best card out. I have two boards about 3 ft. by four, which - during the street concert - I fasten on the sides of the wagon and letter and illustrate during the performance and throughout the lecture. There are dozens in the crowd that stay to watch the work going on that otherwise would drift from the fold during the dryer portion of the Doctor's harangue. Last night at Winchester I made a decided sensation by making a rebus of the well-known lines from Shakespeare: ‑

with a life sized bust of the author, and at another time, a bottle of Townsend's Cholera Balm on legs, and a very hland smile in its cork, mak‑

ing the "Can't come it" gesture at the skeleton, Death, who drops his scythe and hour-glass and turns to flee. Oh: I'm stared at like the fat woman on the side-show banner...-

After the lynching incident, the poet's small hometown went into a period of great anguish and self-scrutiny. Should the law condone the lynching? Obviously it had to since all of the county had either participated in it or done nothing about it. The attention of the State was focused on what the lynch mob had done. Self-righteously believing it had done the "right thing," the town drew its collective energy into internally defending its action. Any criticism within the town was dealt with. Anyone who claimed the town should not have lynched an "untried" man was suspicious. Folk closed ranks against all dissenters. No one from the town was supposed to even talk to outsiders. We find an Editorial in the Hancock DEMOCRAT on July 15th condemning the fact that someone has "broken" the code of silence about the conspiracy to hang Kemmer and talked to the Indianapolis newspapers.

This Editorial demands the Indianapolis JOURNAL to "surrender" the name of the Greenfield "traitor" who provided their information. The goal is to ensure that "all respectable people might not be contaminated by the presence and society of this moral leper."

Shortly after this Editorial we find Riley making a desperate departure from Greenfield on a medicine wagon similar to his departure escapade with Doc McCrillus after his mother's death.

Not only did Riley leave after the lynching of Kemmer, but also Riley's married friend, Nellie Cooley, soon left Greenfield.

Riley's poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night," went through many edi‑
tions and changes over Riley's life but in the 1892 book of it appeared
Riley's addition of the lines about the "airy penalty" when a fellow fell "up"
to heaven. Riley viewed death as "dropping upward." SEE: "Death," com‑
posed contemporaneously with "The Flying Islands of the Night": "My
breath bursts into dust - I can not cry - I whirl - I reel and veer up overhead,
And drop flat-faced against - against - the sky - Soh, bless me! I am dead!"
As I drove by the long abandoned site of the county fairgrounds of the
1870's in this year as the 20th century closed, I could hardly imagine that I
was looking at the place where masked men had lynched a black man for
allegedly raping a white woman. But it was true. What is now a cornfield
on Morristown Pike just south of the lane leading back to the Greenfield

Country Club was once the Hancock County Fairgrounds, a scene of proud livestock shows and country entertainment. The deed from Samuel Milroy to the "Hancock Agricultural Society" was given March 9, 1863 and is recorded in Deed Record V, page 165 in the Office of the Recorder of Hancock County, IN. The eight acre tract served as the county fairgrounds during the 1860's and 1870's.

On this site a "Floral Pavilion" had been built by the society for the ladies to display their floral bouquets, gardening produce and canning at the fair. Unfortunately this pavilion had burned in 1871 and was a ruins - but still standing - shortly after midnight June 26, 1875. On that date and at that time, the "old" Floral Pavilion achieved its most notorious use. It was around a joist of this building in ruins that the mob of masked men threw a cotton rope to hang the Negro man named William Kemmer. The rope was fashioned into a noose at its end tightly coiled around the black man's throat.

The scene must have been eerie indeed as the men approached the fairgrounds that night. The hanging party came to the place surrounding a spring wagon drawn by a gray horse in which the Negro man who had been plucked out of the Hancock County Jail lay. According to observers the only

light came from torches and oil street lamps "confiscated" by the mob as it rode through town in disciplined order. The night was pitch black.

It seems impossible that the scene with bound man being fitted for hanging and piteously begging for his life in the midst of close to two hundred masked men is now merely a field filled with corn stubble since the crops have been harvested.

On U.S. 40 outside of Greenfield to the East on the north side, in a field across the road from what was the old County Home, or "Infirmary" between 400 and 500 East, there appears a strangely inappropriate stand of tall trees in the middle of a field. These trees represent a graveyard without markers of any kind. It was once the place where the county poor were taken to be buried into anonymity. William Kemmer, the lynched Negro, is buried here at some unknown place in this solitary and isolated site. He was buried with the noose with which he had been lynched still around his neck.

Riley must have often felt like the last child of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War.

LINES ON HEARING A COW BAWL
IN A DEEP FIT OF DEJECTION, ON THE
EVENING OF JULY 3, A.D. 1879

That lifts the listener's hair as it swells past, And pour in turbid currents down the lane.

Slow trails the meat-rind' o'er the listless saw; The chickens roosting o'er him on the beam

The smoke-house door bangs once emphatic'ly Then bangs no more, but leaves the silence filled

Most melancholy cow, and sing of thee
Full-hearted through my tears, for, after all,

I. meat-rind, a humorous description of the appearance of a beef cow. Rind is skin in reference to an animal.

2. The image is of chickens swaying their heads into an arch as do the coots, birds which stiffly arch their necks prior to a dive into waters to fish.

3. "Kine" is an old plural form of the "cow," a substitute for the word "cattle." Riley employs paronomasia. His play on the word for "kine" is humorously intended to suggest "kind" as in the expression "How kind (thoughtful, pleasant) of you:-

No flight of fancy is needed to recognize the boy at the woodpile as Abraham Lincoln, the "log-splitter." The poem simply describes how Abraham Lincoln might have felt in contemplation of the 4th of July in the year 1879.

Riley clearly indicates the place where his poem is composed. It is "The Morgue," the name he gave to his second floor paint shop in downtown Greenfield, Indiana . The place of the poem is thus Greenfield in racial turmoil. Greenfield was not a happy place for Riley during the years immedi‑

ately following the Kemmer lynching. The Sheriff who had offered so little resistance, a prosperous farmer of Brandywine Township born in 1840, was elected just the year prior to the lynching, and was re-elected the year later. He did not seek re-election in 1878, but supported his deputy,

William H. Thompson, who was elected that year. Greenfield's mood was out of kilter with Lincoln's vision of a free American nation.

Blacks were treated in Greenfield, as elsewhere, literally as "cattle." We read from an account by George Knox, Greenfield's famous black barber of Riley's epoch of an incident of the kind to which Riley may refer in 1879 while the country was still reeling under the impact of the American Civil War.

Reconstruction of the South was a primary need in those days since the economy there had been based upon the intolerable system of slavery. But what of the blacks from the South? Many migrated north. In this year the four o'clock train arrived in Greenfield with a car load of blacks. Riley's good friend and benefactor George Knox said, "I shall not forget as long as I live, the sensation the news made in the city (Greenfield) and the querulous and anxious and frequently condemnatory looks that were leveled at me from all sides." Knox was approached by a "colored man" (Knox's words) coming with an envelope to the barbershop having been directed there somehow. He handed Knox the envelope and said he had "twenty seven head.^- The letter was addressed to someone named Jones that Knox did not know. When Knox asked him what he meant by "twenty seven head," the man indicated he meant a wide assortment of ages of black folk.

Knox recalled that when he got to the depot a large and angry crowd were gathering. "The excitement was reaching fever heat." The black folk were in desperate circumstances. Some were barely clothed. All were homeless and hungry.

^—The Morgue," in Greenfield, Indiana. On the second floor was Riley's paint shop where he painted signs, composed poetry and often slept. Much of "The Flying Islands of the Night" was composed in this den.

also talked to a white Christian storekeeper of the town who provided food for the destitute homeseekers. None of this went over very well with Greenfield and this store keeper's store was burned shortly afterwards.

What can be done about the dejected singing of the cattle, as the blacks were treated in Riley's hometown? Who would listen to the bawl of one of the kine? Who could speak up for the lynched Kemmer? Lincoln could not. He was dead and "in a dream." Those of tender and disposing sensibilities realized the bawl was a song of the nation. The shame of it comes from the juxtaposition of the "portentous sound"..."awful" on the day before Fourth of July holiday, the day when America celebrated its national independence, values and worth.

Riley's third great encounter with Crestillomeem was his most serious and resulted in delirious experiences. The great expression of the encounter was the writing of Riley's autobiographical piece, "The Flying Islands of the Night." The immediate event causing this delirious flight into fancy was the death of Nellie Cooley, Riley's great encourager. Whereas earlier encounters had been episodic and at generally increasing levels, Riley's alcoholism following Nellie's death was so pronounced that Riley was physically unable to work and deemed himself "ill" which generally meant suffering such serious depression and alcoholism that he often could not leave his bed.

When Nellie Cooley died, Riley truly lost his true soul-partner. Only to Riley and her family was Nellie's death so devestating. So strange it is that there is no record of her death in Belleville, Illinois, the county seat where she died. Nor is there any record of her burial in Greenfield where her body was brought for final rest on July 29, 1878. Riley's writing of her is our only written proof of the dates of such things.

The young poet's reaction to this bereavement, his grief and sense of loss, is expressed in her obituary which Riley wrote and had published in the Hancock DEMOCRAT.

Died, at Belleville, Illinois, July 27, 1878, Nellie M. Cooley, wife of George B. Cooley. Interred at Greenfield, her old home, July 29, 1878. Her life was like a dreamy summer day, made up of bright things only. Warm depths of azure skies, where merry birds, afloat on waves of sunshine, poured out their sweetest songs, and so baptized the world with sweetest melody: where morning walked the dewy paths that led through Nature's fairest haunts, and laid her shining hand on all things loveable; where meadowlands lay basking in the sun and clover-blossoms shook their fragrance out on every passing breeze and flavored all the air with sweetness and delight; where the laughing brook

leaped from its shady hiding-place, low-nestled in among the cool grasses growing in the dusky woods, and, while the lilies leaned their wondering face o'er the brink, and the weeping willows trained their slender hands within the wave, went loitering along its winding way, and babbling limpid music as it went.

Her life was like a dreamy sunny day; and, as always was her wish, on such a day she laid aside the weary task of life, and out across "the all-golden afternoon" she walked on and on into her Father's open arms, and where fell upon her

Cooley, in song together at this organ with Riley playing happiest angel. the violin. A scene in the Riley birthplace, Greenfield,

Nellie Millikan at 16 (1862) when James Whitcomb Riley knew her before her marriage to George Cooley. (Neg. C7172, IMCPL-Riley Collection, Indiana Hisorical Society.)

maiden's hope, a woman's charity. Her heart was soundless in its depths of love; her soul was boundless in its breadth of nobleness; she wore the bond of Friendship loyally, and ever held a gracious hand of welcome to distress. Her home was Joy's abiding place, and Patience, Peace and Love walked ever at her side, as now they walk, appareled in the raiment of the Lord's approving smile, and waiting with her loved ones lingering here.

And the lonesome light of summer through the open door-way falls, But it makes no laugh in the parlor - no voice in the vacant halls.

It finds no queenly presence blessing the solitude With the gracious benediction of royal womanhood

It finds no willowy figure tilting the cage that swings With the little pale canary thatfilrgets the song he sings.

No face at the open window to welcome the fragrant breeze,• No touch at the old piano to waken the sleeping keys.

The idle book lies open, and the folded leaf is pressed Over the half-told story while death relates the rest.

The light steals into the corner where the darkest shadows are, And sweeps with its golden_, fingers the strings of the mute guitar.

And over the drooping mosses it clambers the rustic stand And over the ivy 's tresses it trails a trembling hand

But it brings no smile from the darkness - it calls no face from the gloom ‑

Where the weary voice goes wailing through the empty aisles of prayer. And the hands reach out through the darkness for the touches we have known

When the folded eyes were gleaming with a glory God designed To light a way to Heaven by the smiles they left behind

Was Riley's attachment romantic? We can only speculate about such things. Why did Riley never mention such a thing if that was his feeling and he truly loved her?

To a Nineteenth Century American, honor required giving respect to a married person as such. Honor required one to regard married people as inviolably matched. In private Riley might love Nellie dearly, but his sense of honor did not permit him to break up their marriage. In addition, Riley seems to have loved Nellie's husband almost as much as Nellie fraternally.

After Nellie's death, honor seemed to Riley much less of an excuse for not having Nellie in his life. His dedication quotation to a later edition of "The Flying

"Dwianie's" currently unmarked grave. According to cemetery officials, the grave of Nellie Millikan Cooley is in a small row of lots purchased by her husband George when Greenfield, Indiana first opened its Park Cemetery. Only the resistance to a probe of pea gravel placed around the wooden coffins in those days permitted its location by a cemetery ground crew. I placed my jacket on the spot.

Islands of the Night" berates honor as "A thynege of wychencref, an idle dreme..." This comes from Thomas Chatterton's "AElla," lines 536-7 where a frustrated "other man" contemplates the situation of a betrothed woman taken by a friend. Riley was equally frustrated by honor which kept Nellie Cooley from his arms. George Cooley was his friend.

This death of his beloved shortly before the writing of "The Flying Islands of the Night" is represented in "Wraith- Song of Spraivoll" at the commencement of Act III of "The Flying Islands of the Night." A "wraith" has a 1500's sense of an immaterial spectral appearance of a living being, portending the person's death. Here, Riley the poet, is close to death from alcoholism depressed over the death of his beloved Nellie Cooley. Spraivoll, the poet's poetic self, bemoans his despair at the situation of Riley having lost Nellie to the hand of death.

Of gentle hands on brow and hair. -The lack of this once pained me much, And so I have a care.

That beat the dead boughs where ye cling, And old dead nests beneath the eaves -

And life and hope,^• and so I sing: In all the graveyard of my heart Love is the deadest thing!

There is a recollection of Minnie Belle Mitchell about Riley with Nellie and her family.

"James W. Riley was in his early teens when the Millikan family came from the east and settled in Greenfield. Mrs. Millikan, a widow with three sons and two daughters, brought with her Greenfield's first piano. Because young Riley possessed another gift, a talent for music, he was at once attracted to the family, especially to the younger daughter, Nellie, who not only played the piano, but also that sentimental instrument, the guitar.

Bud was intrenched into the Millikan family. He and the youngest son, Jesse, established an intimate friendship which grew with each year until the latter's death.

But the lad's friendship for Nellie was different. She was a gay, vivacious, fun-loving girl and young woman. Her music delighted him. She

shared in the boys' games, helped young Riley with his studies and laughed sympathetically at his wild antics and mimicry. She was the personification of a satisfying friend and enough older than him to exercise a sister's prerogative of advising, criticizing and rebuking him when the need arose.

The intimacy and freedom of the Millikan home established in those early days remained unchanged on through Nellie's courtship and marriage to George Cooley, who shared in the family's affectionate regard for the sixteen year-old lad.

All through the years of the young poet's diligent writing and struggle for recognition, Nellie remained his staunch friend and critic. Her standards were high. She not only encouraged and praised his poetic efforts but she chided him at times when a passing weakness turned his faltering steps away from his coveted goal. She, with a mother's intuition, sustained him with her impelling faith in his ultimate success and started him again upon the upward grade.

The happy times with the Millikans did not end, however, with Nellie's marriage. She and her husband with young Bud and Jesse attended the dancing club which was an integral part of all social gatherings and they were always the life of the crowd. Bud and Nellie also led in charade parties which finally developed into parlor dramatics. Later young Riley, with a group of friends, organized a dramatic club known as "The Adelphians." It was in this organization that he found his greatest pleasure - he was a born actor. The years he had spent in character study and mimicry stood him well in hand and the Cooleys and other intimates formed an enviable cast.

In 1875, Mrs. Millikan's family and the Cooleys moved to Illinois. There were later two small children in the Cooley family. The frequent letters that were exchanged, especially Nellie's bright, encouraging ones, cheered the young poet in a way, yet his loneliness was great. An intimacy extending over many years could not be broken without a pull at heart strings. Finally after three years absence, the faithful friend whose love and interest was much like that of a mother, passed away at Belleville, Illinois, on July 27,

Riley's response to Nellie's death was a lapse into even more continuous intoxications with attendant occasional deliriums. Riley's call for Crestillomeem (his alcoholism) to take over his life is found in his autobiographical poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night," where Riley admits:

That Riley was parted with Nellie he had come to accept. That he was consigned never to live with Nellie was never accepted. Her death sealed that fact. It literally "cocooned" him. He took to the night only as a place where he might function away from people.

In another part of the poem, Crestillomeem, Riley's alcoholism, acknowledges that but to achieve fame can Riley choose to live and avoid suicide.

If his debauched nature can put an end to the reputable "Krung", then the triumph of debauchery will be complete and Riley must succumb to utter despair and suicide.

With the death of Nellie Cooley, Riley faced a bleak future. There would never be the affection or essential signs of love, the expectation of embrace and kiss or physical affection. Gone was the great "backer." This lack generated great anxiety. The goal of happiness becomes unattainable. If one is of a great loving nature, the expression of it becomes frustrated. The anger must be released. When the death is of one's great soul-partner there is no one with whom to express the depth of the separation. Nellie was this soul-partner of Riley.

Without Nellie to encourage him he was like "The Singer" of his poem of that name:

To rest him from his toil. - Death's Angel, like a vast eclipse, Above him spreads her wings, And /fans the embers of his lips To ashes as he sings.

Nellie was dead and after her death, fame seemed meaningless. Who could share Riley's joy with the polish of a word or turn of a phrase or being published? Death takes the triumph out of success.

Riley's reputation was also a terrible problem now that he was falling deeper into addiction.

1. Intoxication is a crime in Indiana as James Whitcomb Riley came to know from being convicted of it.

2. Dridular is a prohibitionist agitator. The word is suggestive of a "dry dealer" in "intoxicatese" or the opposite of alcohol dealing.

"0 what is Life at last," says you, 'At woman folks and man ,folks, too, Cain's oncomplainin, worry through?

"An' what is Love, 'at no one yit At's monkeyed with it kin lbrgit, Er gh`s fat on remember,/ hit?

"An' what is Death?" - looky hyur - Ef Life an' Love don't suit you, sir, Hit's jes' the thing yer lookin' feri

In 1879. Riley, considering himself as Jucklet of his play, composed "A Toast of Jucklet's," in similar Chattertonian bawd to his writing in "The Flying Islands," "To the Wine-God Merlus"

And laughter-streaming eyes, thou iffiest up The heart of me like any wassail-cup,

And from its teeming brim, in foaming drips, Thou Howes/ all my cares. I cry to thee Between the sips.. - Drink long and lustily; Drink thou m ripest joys, my richest mirth, My maddest staves of wanton minstrelsy,• Drink every song I've tinkered here on earth With any patch of music,. drink! and be Thou drainer of my soul, and to the lees Drink all my lover-thrills and ecstasies; And with a final gulp - ho! ho! - drink me, And roll me o'er thy tongue eternally.

Actually, in the poem itself, Crestillomeem is the Riley "self" who enchants Riley into alcoholism and delirium tremens. ("At present doth the King (Riley) lie in a sleep Drug-wrought and deep as death - the after-phase of an unconscious state...") The poem is in the ostensible form of a "play," because this most fanciful of Riley's poems is a "play" on his life. It is writ‑

ten as a takeoff of a 15th century play such as Thomas Chatterton, the fantastic forger- boy would have written and passed off as play of the non-existent monk Rowley. It probably owes its form more to the gloom Poe fitted into his "Scenes from Politian." But Riley's "play" is not dreamish humorous or despairing however clever and entertaining or dishonest as a forgery on life it might be or as it may appear or be. "The Flying Islands of the Night" is boldly delirious-appropriate to Riley's hellish perception of his existence without ordinary love.

Riley intimately knows this cast member, Crestillomeem, a pushy, slutty lady-this possibly mannish cross-dressing queen of a fantasy horror show who slurs words and lurks behind him ready to take over his life at every juncture. She is the foil of a W.C.T.U. crusader of Riley's late Nineteenth Century era, a type of personality who has haunted Riley and hunted him out for persecution as a youth to ridicule him and call him a "no-good" in his adolescence, to drive him under and sign a pledge not to drink. The fact is Riley's "Crestillomeem" is on the other side of the issue of alcoholism but just as determined a lady as any temperance "bitch." "Crestillomeem" wants Riley drunk and delirious. She doesn't want him writing poetry. She likes him suicidal. She is the reincarnation of the poison that Thomas Chatterton took when his forgeries became known. Crestillomeem wants Riley dead if not drunk and insists he sign a "pledge" to stay drunk just as her "purer" W.C.T.U. counterparts want Riley to sign a pledge to abstain from alcohol! Will Riley sign on to alcoholism's "Murphy" pledge? His autobiographical poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night" tells us.

She wants him to die as did Thomas Chatterton, the poet whose life was such a fascination to Riley - the boy who ditched an apprenticeship in the law, wrote forgeries, but then committed suicide horribly through taking arsenic rather than face life after exposure of his forged poems. Following the condemnations of Riley for forging "Leonainie," Riley must have considered the same course of suicidal action.

Riley was afflicted with terrible suicidal depression as well as alcoholism. This is not beyond expectation. Creative writers are much more often afflicted by disabling personality traits as well as alcoholism, and writers are more than twice as likely to have affective disorders as other high achievers according to the recent psychiatric study by the British Psychiatrist Felix Post in his article, "Verbal Creativity, Depression and Alcoholism," in the BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY 1966.

Riley's life demanded he find an answer to his dilemma about seeking fame as a poet.

So came Riley's "Declaration of Independence" from prior American poetry, particularly that of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This conclusion was announced in a letter to the editor carried in the Kokomo TRIBUNE of April 5, 1879. The letter was signed by Riley's nom de plume John Walker. The letter to the newspaper was entitled, "USE AND ABUSE OF THE POETIC THEME."

"Poetry," said Johnson, "is the next best thing to prose." And in my belief had Johnson lived on until the present day and age, that utterance would now read, "Poetry is the next best thing to nothing."

The poetry of to-day is altogether too lush - too "sobby," I may say; too much sap, and not enough timber, you understand. It's just as refreshing, perhaps, to those who never use it as it ever was; but to those who liked myself have the smoldering embers of poetic fire forever gasping the fuel true genius alone can supply, the poetry of to-day only serves to smother and depress the flickering flames that otherwise would leap up roaringly, and illuminate the whole heart like a torch-light procession.

Poets who will persist in writing the poetry of to-day ought to be bucked and gagged, and rolled up like a ball of stale pop-corn and thrown out of the car-window of modern advancement. And yet how many unfettered hands do we daily see lifted in this most unholy practice.

Nor is the Press of our land wholly guiltless of lending furtherance to this most crying wrong; for it not only passively submits to these constantly recurring atrocities of rhyme, but - indirectly it may be - it aids and abets the evil by publishing and reproducing the very "poems" which otherwise would drop at once into the famishing oblivion which pants for them in vain. Where is the boasted justice of our broad Republic? Where is the Red-eyed Law we boast of? And "where, may I ask, is the Grand Jury of our land?"

This train of thought has been most painfully inflicted on my mind by a recent "poem," still going the rounds of the press, entitled "The Chamber Over the Gate," and openly claimed by its author, Henry W. Longfellow.

Now, personally, I have nothing but the kindliest feeling toward Mr. Longfellow, but. in justice to the demands of the strictly literary element of

Howard county, and Kokomo in particular, I must affirm that the really "suggestive and inviting theme he has selected, has not only met with neglect at his hands, but positive abuse. Yet like the thousands like it that are daily flaunted in our faces by the public press, it is copied, reproduced, and duplicated till the path of progress is literally strewn and choked with the rank dead leaves of poetical ruin and literary woe.

I cannot comment at length upon a subject so glutted with disaster and so bleared and bloated with the highwires of distress, but I will add, by way of admonition to Mr. L. that an author, and poet in particular, cannot be too cautions in his encroachments on the public weal. There are, I am frank to admit, certain points in "The Chamber over the Gate" that would warrant me in advising Mr. L. to continue, for a time at least, in the exercise of his poetical inclinations, but even this advice I must withhold, unless, indeed, the audacious aspirant will curb his ambition, and adopt in future for each succeeding effort of his pen, a fresh nom de plume. This, in a measure, would advance anything of worth he might chance to produce, while it would shield him as well from the pain and humiliation he must necessarily feel in reading such criticisms as the one my duty now calls on me to lay before the world. And now that I have gone so far in pointing out this glaring discrepancy, and directing at least one wandering upon his pilgrimage to the Great Perhaps, it becomes my further duty to illustrate, both to the unfortunate poet, and to my many admirers, the real principle involved in the poetical management of the theme he has so ruthlessly distorted and abused.

I subjoin a hastily arranged though mainly perfect copy of the poem as it should be treated by a master hand.

a^orEl'^k-Nk^lx\E 'MAKCIPA,110N,

- cLAtil AI' t ON

(fak. .,V--.nAkCAAA4

Tvr) (r\ (S.A.

Riley never forgot that the African-American barber of Greenfield. George Knox. employed him and provided the little money Riley had to live on as an adolescent.

Faces of Hoosiers Riley would have known. From the author's Ora Myers glass
negative collection of Hancock County, Indiana subjects.

Here is something very new in the life of James Whitcomb Riley. Yes, he wanted to be a poet. He had always wanted to be a poet. Yet his life had driven him into despair, confused depression and alcoholism. Poetry was going to save him if anything could. Here would be his fun as well as his life itself.

To find his voice it was necessary for him to transform poetry itself. This meant first and foremost to break awayfrom the mainstream "Longfellow-type romantic" poetry which he had previously most admired.

He wrote poetry as "Old Sport" wrote doggerel for awhile. This was Riley's John Walker poetry. "Who is Old Sport?" "Old Sport" was where Riley was coming from.

Let us first consider the "elevated" poetry of America's poet laureate prior to Riley's advent. "The Chamber Over the Gate" was a poem of the elderly Longfellow written October 30, 1878. Longfellow wrote it to accompany a letter of condolence written to a Protestant "Bishop" of Mississippi, Rev. Duncan C. Green, whose son had died in Greenville, Mississippi serving victims of an outbreak of yellow fever.

In the chamber over the gate That old man hesitate - Watching and waiting there To swoop down unaware?

There is neither there nor here, There is neither soon nor late, In that Chamber over the Gate, Nor any long ago

From the ages that are past The voice sounds like a blast Over seas that wreck and drown, Over tumult of traffic and town,• And from ages yet to be

Somewhere at every hour The watchman on the tower Looks forth, and sees the fleet Approach of 'the the huriying feet Of messengers, that bear The tidings of despair,