Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings; with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom.

These lines come from Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo,” a performance-oriented piece first published in the 1910s and closely associated with Lindsay’s public recitations. Lindsay, a prominent early-20th-century American poet, often wrote “chant” poems meant to be spoken aloud with strong rhythm and refrain. “The Congo” reflects the era’s primitivist fascination with Africa and uses dialect, caricature, and racialized imagery that has made the poem controversial and frequently criticized in later scholarship. The quoted stanza belongs to the poem’s opening section, which depicts a raucous, drunken scene in a barrelhouse/wine-barrel room as part of a larger crescendo of sound and spectacle.

The passage is built as a driving chant: heavy stresses, repetition (“Pounded on the table”), and percussive verbs (“sagged,” “reeled,” “pounded,” “beat”) imitate the music and stomping it describes. The “barrel-house” setting and improvised drumming on an empty barrel turn the room itself into an instrument, emphasizing bodily rhythm and communal frenzy. At the same time, the imagery is filtered through Lindsay’s sensationalizing, racialized lens—presenting Black figures as “kings” of a crude revel but also as stereotypes of excess and instability. The stanza’s significance lies in how it exemplifies Lindsay’s modern performance poetics while also revealing the period’s troubling racial imaginaries.