Classic Poem

for Henry George: 1897

He was of the race ascendant incarnating the brooded dreams,
He was a partitioner but used no knife to wound,
He was beamed and raftered as a house strong in the wind.

I do not count him great by the enemies or friends he has made,
Nor by his failures and successes, nor by his dextrous speech, nor by his artful pen,
But by something underneath all these, more near the average heart.

He is dead, he fell with the onward wave of the fight driving death up the shore,
To the last sustained his standard was unclosed to the air:
Alas! he is vanished — death has withdrawn him from the reel and the shout:
But the red banner still flies in the place that it won by his charge: it calls down to me:
Do not look for me on the ground — I am here in the large spaced skies.

And so we buried him without pomp but with much love,
And the dead face that we looked at in the coffin was yet benignant with unharvested promise,
And when they took his brave body from us, they who give the worn frame to the unmolesting earth,
We, without voice, happy in our inheritance, in rank once more, freed the old song of revolt.