Classic Poem

Soul of my inner face, face of my race,
Strong mask of self-assertion, positive,
Firm lip of competition, masculine,
Broad brow of Mercury, quick, cunning, keen,
Fierce eye of Mars with crest of sunlit fringe!
Through nights of Time I mark thy luminous course,
Furrowing rich worlds with prow piratical,
Grafting new shoots on broken racial stems,
Sowing old soils fresh fertilized with blood.
Thou art the sieve of men, whence weaker bulks
Slip through the meshes to oblivion.
Breathe through my blood once more thy feverish glow,
Long chilled by cooling crusts of compromise;
Thou, strong in reciprocity of needs,
Expansive self-willed personality!

Standing upon the vantage-ground of peaks
Kissed by the light of rising Easter dawns,
I mark long lines of shadows surge like ghosts
Waging with noiseless shout their mimic war.
As some vast wave o'ertopping lunar tides,
Engendered at the bottom of the sea
By stifled monsters wrenched, whose fissured mouths
Feed on her protoplasmic gelatines,
Sweeps on with circling rim, like living discs
Of light from stars long centuries extinct,
Slipping from pole to pole as if a hand
Caressed the tiny surface of this ball; —
So from dark mouths of prehistoric woods
Which once had reared their gloomy palisades
To hail the slow retreat of baffled ice,

Issue chill floods of melting Northern snows,
A wild Teutonic wave of glacial steel
Submerging Roman worlds; with surge of spray
Mocking the lonely sentinels of Alps,
Cresting the faithful bar of Apennines,
Storming the portals of the Pyrenees,
Tainting the sunlit laughter of the Rhine
With eddying crimson shrieks of tortured hearts; —
A flood of human fiends, by furies driven
To quaff the wine of life from lipless skulls,
And doom for slaves fair weeping captive maids
In marts of their own marble palaces.