Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[622] to take permanent literary form, are enclosed. These speeches are more lyric in feeling than the narrative parts, and, says Cushing, ‘are almost always in faultless blank verse measure, and are often grandly poetic,’ an observation which is borne out by his own incompleted translations. See the following speech of the Beloved Gods, taking counsel how they will prepare the earth for men:

Let us shelter the land where our children are resting.
Yea, the depths and the valleys beyond shall be sheltered
By the shade of our cloud shield.
Let us lay to its circle
Our firebolts of thunder, to all the four quarters
Then smite with our arrows of lightning from under!
Lo the earth shall heave upward and downward with thunder!
Lo the fire shall belch outward and burn the world over
And floods of hot water shall seethe swift before it!
Lo, smoke of earth stenches shall blacken the daylight
And deaden the sense of them else escaping
And lessen the number of fierce preying monsters
That the earth be made safer for men and more stable.

Or later, in another measure, Pautiwa, the ‘cloud sender and sun priest of souls,’ speaks in the councils of the gods to the K'yah'he:

As a woman with children
Is loved for her power
Of keeping unbroken
The life line of kinsfolk,
So shalt thou, tireless hearer,
Be cherished among us
And worshipped of mortals
For keeping unbroken
The tale of Creation.

The prose portions of the tale relate how Awonawilona, the All Father, was ‘conceived within himself and thought outward in space; whereby mists of increase, steams potent of growth, were evolved and uplifted.’ By this process of out-thinking he concentrated himself in the form of the Sun, forming out of his own substance the Fourfold-Containing Earth Mother and the All-Covering Father Sky. The world of men were the offspring of these two.