Classic Poem

When God creates new worlds in his immensities
He hides his laboratory from man's eyes,
Where light or darkness covers, so intense it is,
And countless eons ripen the surprise.

He shows no haste in trying his experiments,
A million times he makes, remakes, destroys;
In living forms he weaves the cast-off cerements,
To mould the new he uses old alloys.

Upon this earth of ours what endless mysteries!
What mighty monsters battling all in vain,
Left in their fossil graves naught of their histories,
Save that they lived and battled and were slain!

What haughty empires, kingdoms, principalities
Rose, boasted in their strength, decayed!
By what strange and not seldom mean fatalities
Their pride was darkened by oblivion's shade!

Most are forgotten like the waves that thundrously
Poise to fall foaming on a rugged shore;
Yet all the while the will of God is wondrously
Evolving his vast plan forevermore.

The crags are undermined, and slowly tottering
Crash into boulders that in turn are crushed
By impact, wave-beat, and the storm-cloud's watering,
Till into microscopic sands they're hushed.

The tiny fountain-head, mid glacier-cherishing
And solemn mountain heights unvisited,
Fed by the melting ice and rain-clouds perishing,
Sends down the valley its clear silver thread.

Rill, brook, and stream, with tributaries numberless,
Down giddy precipices, through wide lands,
It glides, leaps, loiters, hastes, in progress slumberless,
Turns mills, bears ships, and still its life expands.

No eye may see when cataclysms furious
Throw up new islands or destroy vast stars;
Time's birth-throes are cloud-hidden from the curious,
Only conjecture peoples red-lined Mars.

God gives small heed to human ceremonial,
The pageantries of fields of Cloth of Gold
With all their splendors royal and baronial
Are naught; from them no wide results unfold.

But in some hidden corner unnotorious,
Unmarked at first by History's casual glance,
Begins the event that makes for man such glorious,
Prodigious, never-to-be-checked advance.

There on that awkward, mean, and leaky coracle
A band of young enthusiasts (such they were),
As in obedience to Religion's oracle,
Put forth their hands a solemn oath to swear.

That compact — visual symbol of soul-bravery,
The Magna Charta of free government —
Was sworn in solemn awe in that unsavory,
Dark, dingy hull, unfit for such event.

Master and servant, scholar and illiterate
Alike subscribed to that momentous deed,
Which men in coming ages should reiterate
Through mighty growth of freedom's planted seed.

All Europe might have paused for that brief hour of Fate
From wars and persecutions, to behold
The lumbering hulk of that hired bark, Mayflower (of Fate
Strange instrument), as on the waves it rolled.

This meant the doom of autocrats and tyrannies,
The limitation of the will of kings.
(Oh wonderful are Evolution's ironies!
Who dares to throw contempt on trivial things?)

It meant that peasants of alien nationalities,
The weak, the persecuted, the opprest,
Might here find refuge, learn sweet idealities,
And 'neath the Tree of Liberty be blest.

Oh motley band! dissension-torn, disconsolate,
With crampt hands clutching the unusual pen,
The sun of freedom, which on others shone so late,
For you and us, your kin, was dawning then.

How little did ye see its wide beneficence?
By stern necessity ye seemed coerced,
Facing the wilderness, the winter's maleficence,
The savages, wild beasts, dearth, hunger, thirst.

Forgetting faction, calming animosities
Born of the narrow room, the clash of will,
Each said, " I yield, how great soe'er the loss it is;
I sink myself my duty to fulfil! "

Oh motley band of Pilgrims, all unwittingly
Ye posed for Art, ye stood for Poesy,
Ye lived for Eloquence — all too unfittingly
Depicting this crown fact of history.

Ye stood there in your rugged rough simplicity,
Silent and solemn, waiting each your turn,
Not realizing your supreme felicity
In founding this new empire grand and stern.

An empire, a republic, a democracy,
Where yeomen should with all have equal right
And manhood form the only aristocracy
And justice rule with even-handed might.

Ye gave new hope, new courage to humanity;
Ye broke new paths where men might safely go;
Ye smote old feudal prejudice and vanity;
Ye gave ecclesiastic pride its blow.

Such was your lofty service to posterity,
Ye pilgrim founders of a splendid state,
And hence in all your Puritan austerity
The world acclaims you as supremely great.