Classic Poem

V.

America, thou art not to blame
If slow humanity crawls and will not run
Toward lands more golden, that the wealthful sun
Of freedom richlier warms and shines upon!
America, in thy name
The best that men can do this hour is done!
Of progress in its onward flight
Thine are the sinewy fearless eagle-wings;
Thou art the foremost in the world's wide fight
For royaller royalties than fleshly kings.
On Europe, numbed with tyranny's cold spell,
The auroral light of thy great sunrise fell,
And lo, as when some glacial polar sea
Is smitten of Spring down all its torpid deep,
And through it mighty lengthening fissures creep,
Or ominous rumbling throes begin to be,
So in the Old World's long-frozen breast awoke
Desires that seemed at first of faint degree,
But now become desires no power can choke
Till the ancient East like the young West is free!
Yet not the mad mob, furious to be fed,
Groaning wild violent words of priest and tax,
Not flaming palaces, nor streets clogged with dead,
Nor white throats bared below the pitiless axe,
Not these, O liberty, are the potent means
Wherewith thy reverend cause is profited.
Thou valuest more than slaughtered kings and queens
The slaying of baser passions in men's blood;
And more than jewelled crowns being flung in mud,
The glitter of self-love spurned by noble feet.
More than all ruinous fire to thee is sweet
That holy and never-flickering flame which feeds
Not on cathedral-spires nor monkish bones,
Nor fragments broken away from gilded thrones,
But whose pure outflow burns intense
With patient charity's myrrh and frankincense
And the rich sacred fuel of chaste unselfish deeds!

VI.

For liberty, though her range be vastly wide,
Still moves in glorious orbit round some might
Unknowable, whose colossal satellite
She is and must perpetually abide.
That which we call being free is but to say
That we are free to obey, —
That we are free to adore, to reverence right!
Once swerve from that sublimer statelier way,
Once break the golden gyves of self-control,
And lo, a desolate freedom finds the soul,
A broad captivity whose realm begins
Where folly's vaporous air holds blinding sway,
But whose dark distance its wild boundary wins
Among the appalling glooms of unrestricted sins!

VII.

So dreamed and taught the old noble Greeks,
Haters of manacle and yoke,
Dwellers on wisdom's mountain-peaks,
They that such grand philosophy spoke,
Making their nation's heart beat such magnificent stroke!
Even so they taught and dreamed,
While Athens, that clear lily of freedom, rose
A glorious martial flower
Where the blue Ægean gleamed,
With precious odors flowing across the world
From petals whiter than Olympian snows!
But lo, in an evil hour,
To the dust her bloom was hurled,
Still rich in beauty and grace, but not in power!
Then liberty seemed alone to live, for a while,
In Rome's imperial smile,
Sweetening its pride, as though
Stern crags by some tumultuous sea should feel
Their jagged bleakness bathed in a rosy glow.
Then came libidinous times that saw men kneel
Before base rulers wallowing in lust,
To-day on luxury gorged, with bloated face
Brow-bound in festal flowers, to-morrow thrust
As strangled corpses from that purple place
They soiled with splendors of disgrace!
Then liberty vanished wholly, and no more
Did palaces or lowlier homes less fair
Reveal her sculptural face and starry eyes,
Her timorous yet archangelic air.
But now with sinewy and sharp-taloned hand,
Fierce superstition, clutching at Europe's throat,
Dragged her to shadowy durance, and she lay
Loaded with fetters, far from liberal day,
In bigotry's dungeons, deep, remote,
While myriad martyrs died within her land
By stake and gibbet and rack; for the sweet sway
Of Christ, who had come to save and not to slay,
Was turned a bloody despotism, a band
Of tigerish dogmas that lurked, leapt and smote,
Howling inquisitorial howls above their prey!

VIII.

So prospering, wrong abode;
But her dark reign was broken at times with light,
For the star of Milton owed
Its lonely splendor to the age's night,
And later with clear silvery vigor glowed
The fire of Locke's pure wisdom, calmly bright;
Or yet across the opaque heaven men saw go
The audacious meteor-spirit of Rousseau! ...
But not on Eastern lands, when the hour was ripe,
Nay, not in Eastern air, when the night was done,
Rose liberty's beauteous reascendant sun!
Not Italy saw the dawn's fair damask stripe,
Nor yet the glory of that large dazzling glance
Had fallen upon pale hunger-maddened France.
America, thou alone wert chosen on earth
Out of all nations joyously to hold
That dewy sunrise, of so noble a gold,
Which bathed thy meadowy slopes in lavish beams,
And made circuitous pomp of thy proud streams,
And turned thy solemn ocean to one scintillant mirth!