Classic Poem

I

O RISEN Spring, thy rosy tides
O'er earth's pale shoulder glow;
From heavenly peaks, down Europe's sides,
The torrent sunbeams flow;
Across the verdure-belted zones what ceaseless seasons go!
All, all, indifferent to human woe!

The sea with corpses blossoms, as of old
On the bright Salaminian bay
Ere the gray waste, unrolled,
On the wide-wanderer's eyes flung dim Pacific spray;
Immeasurable spreads afar
The battle-tossing plain of war,
And of fair cities makes a gaunt volcanic scar;
From up-torn realms untenanted
The beasts and birds affrighted fled;
Prone, where the sire his life-blood shed,
The mother on the child lies dead;
The torch, the axe, the bomb, the shell
Paint earth and heaven in hues of hell;
Famine, massacre, slavery fall
On man in horrid carnival.
Great is thy triumph, modern age!
Progress thy bane, science thy scourge,
In sea and air new wars to wage,
And aye to evil fates, incessant, urge
Man's miserable race, on ruin's awful verge!

II

Meanwhile, on blue-horizoned shores, against Floridian skies,
Lone, white cranes, standing, fish; from sunset-colored caves
The darting mullet hues the shadow-haunted waves;
In pale, pellucid depths the rude crustacean lies.
There, with the daedal earth
The great Creator toys;
A thousand shapes of mirth,
A million vivid joys,
Like grains of coral sand,
Drop from His listless hand. —
How should man understand?

III

O Easter moon that glorious
In highest heaven dost roll,
What saw you on the Caucasus
Great with Prometheus' soul?
Where Calvary's shining road makes up from the dark vale below,
Saw you thorn-crowned beneath a Cross a man of sorrows go,
The Sufferer, who never dies, but bears the whole world's woe?
Saw you from Athens' ghostly hand the torch of truth burn bright,
That spreads within the mind the world where shall be no more night?
Saw you the Tiber, Seine and Thames, the floods that shake the North,
Pour inexhaustibly their hosts of stern-faced freemen forth?
Far as your circling light below hath on our oceans broke,
Saw you the little acorns grown, blown from the English oak,
The tree of liberty, that laughs amid the thunder-stroke?
And Paris, Honor's fount — O name that never time forgets! —
Look you! how high in our sad heavens her ray of glory jets!
Look! as your crescent horn but late filled its dark curve with light,
So grows America on earth amid the nations bright! —
Or is it, crystal sphere serene that hast no mortal stain,
You do not mind, at all, these things, which man has done in vain?
Oh, can it be, then, nature's law
That her the vision fails, —
The dream divine, and holy awe
That in man most avails?
And know you not, celestial orb
The light men's souls from you absorb
Beholding, when dark deaths they risk,
With highest instincts in accord,
How pure in heaven your golden disk
Haloes the Risen Lord?

IV

Upon the border of eternity —
As some Greek runner, on high mountain ways,
Whom now at eve his speed of morn delays,
Hears the far rote of his own native sea —
I harken unto deathless voices rolled
From the great deep, and silent lyres of old;
And with the sound thereof my lips grow bold.
Man's is another world
Wherein the spirit flies;
Truth at his heart impearled,
A thousand deaths he dies.
O wake again, Tyrtaean lyre
That flung the world's first tyrants low!
Heap up thy urn with holy fire
That now doth in all peoples glow!
Once more the dreadful trumpet sound
Of freedom, Macedonian mound!
Thou, gray Thermopylae, arise!
Who lifted first on human eyes
Victorious shields of sacrifice, —
And old Simonides thy glory crowned,
Leading the poets' bright, immortal choir.
Still rolls aloft the heroic hymn
Of men, when light and life grow dim.
O sacred bands, dear to the lyre's blest breath
That, ever resonant with noble death,
Sweeps eagle-borne round glory's cloudy wreath,
A thousand dawns we sang you to the fight,
A thousand victories sang you home at night!
Look up, ye hosts! o'er heroes when they die
Opens in heaven another climbing sky!
Sweet is your memory here, and fresh with tears
That wash from shining eyes our mortal fears. —
Peace at the last, and moods all joys above,
Calm thoughts that from just reason take their birth!
Truth at the last, and liberty, and love
Shall, like your glory, fill the ensanguined earth!