An Ode in Time of Hesitation

IV

Alas! what sounds are these that come

Sullenly over the Pacific seas, —

Sounds of ignoble battle, striking dumb

The season's half-awakened ecstasies?

Must I be humble, then,

Now when my heart hath need of pride?

Wild love falls on me from these sculptured men;

By loving much the land for which they died

I would be justified.

My spirit was away on pinions wide

To soothe in praise of her its passionate mood

And ease it of its ache of gratitude.

Too sorely heavy is the debt they lay

On me and the companions of my day.

I would remember now

My country's goodliness, make sweet her name.

Alas! what shade art thou

Of sorrow or of blame

Liftest the lyric leafage from her brow,

And pointest a slow finger at her shame?

V

Lies! lies! It cannot be! The wars we wage

Are noble, and our battles still are won

By justice for us, ere we lift the gage.

We have not sold our loftiest heritage.

The proud republic hath not stooped to cheat

And scramble in the market-place of war;

Her forehead weareth yet its solemn star.

Here is her witness: this, her perfect son,

This delicate and proud New England soul

Who leads despisèd men, with just-unshackled feet,

Up the large ways where death and glory meet,

To show all peoples that our shame is done,

That once more we are clean and spirit-whole.

VI

Crouched in the sea fog on the moaning sand

All night he lay, speaking some simple word

From hour to hour to the slow minds that heard,

Holding each poor life gently in his hand

And breathing on the base rejected clay

Till each dark face shone mystical and grand

Against the breaking day;

And lo, the shard the potter cast away

Was grown a fiery chalice crystal-fine

Fulfilled of the divine

Great wine of battle wrath by God's ring-finger stirred.

Then upward, where the shadowy bastion loomed

Huge on the mountain in the wet sea light,

Whence now, and now, infernal flowerage bloomed,

Bloomed, burst, and scattered down its deadly seed, —

They swept, and died like freemen on the height,

Like freemen, and like men of noble breed;

And when the battle fell away at night

By hasty and contemptuous hands were thrust

Obscurely in a common grave with him

The fair-haired keeper of their love and trust.

Now limb doth mingle with dissolvèd limb

In nature's busy old democracy

To flush the mountain laurel when she blows

Sweet by the southern sea,

And heart with crumbled heart climbs in the rose: —

The untaught hearts with the high heart that knew

This mountain fortress for no earthly hold

Of temporal quarrel, but the bastion old

Of spiritual wrong,

Built by an unjust nation sheer and strong,

Expugnable but by a nation's rue

And bowing down before that equal shrine

By all men held divine,

Whereof his band and he were the most holy sign.