Classic Poem

FRAGMENT OF AN ODE FOR GREEK LIBERTY

...
Y OUR enemy like startled fowl flies forth.

Not by nice reckoning
Of chance and odd,
Nor martyrdom of meek repose
Is reft from God
The Laurel and the Rose.
Nor matters it to bring
Trophies home and a victor rod
With blare of trumpets and caparison:
It needs not to have won
To be great.
But the exulting soul
Which strides alone against the sun,
By his own passion hurled
And slave to his desire's supreme control
Is master of the world.

Go out! To horse! Once more
As ye were first —
For they have sold
All, bartered all, better and best,
And to their richest guest,
When the bargain's o'er
And they the counted utmost hold,
They let out Liberty like any whore. —

Brahma or Assur, Allah, Christ or Zeus,
Or what strange name beside,
Who is this God our sacrifice pursues?
A shadow unrevealed
Behind the circled sun he stands,
Muffled in everlasting pride, —
While with uplifted hands,
Tho' harvests, hills and strands
Frittered with use,
The endless earth in ecstasy has kneeled.
Who is this God our prayer pursues?
Down the big night of time,
On wings of ancient wind
The gray smoke from a thousand altars rolls,
And anthems cried by choired souls
Immeasurably combined
Crowd in the sky sublime. —
Who is he? where? and may he be divined?
And shall this aenigmatic Justice wake
Upon their dreary end,
Reckoning retribution for their pangs?
Shall he beat heaven till it bend,
And in this nation's fangs
His barbed spear of yellow lightning break? —
Or must their piteous wrong
Of slaughtered men, women befouled
And nurslings trampled in the mire,
Hurl its terrific song,
The crying measure of a last desire? —
And get no more than when the dying lion growled!

Aye, should he rise,
The master shrouded in our prayer,
Girding his sacred loins
About the vengeance that this world denies,
He would change our air
To golden sulphur solid as the sun,
And rend the planet's groins
With his curse,
Till down the universe
Made vagabond,
Shattered and fragmentary and undone,
The frail flame-winged embers should rehearse
Our cataclysm to the great stars beyond.

He shall not rise. Let hope in veils of pall
This widely crimson morning close;
The supreme warriors fall
Where virtue first arose.
Let no one weep the happy to repose
...