The New Morning | Page 4

night of stars--?The trumpets of the last Republic roll?Far off, an end to wars;
An end, an end to that wild blood-red age,?That made and keeps us blind;?A mightier realm shall be her heritage,?The kingdom of mankind.
Chosen from many nations, and made one;?But first, O Mother, from thee,?When, following, following on that Pilgrim sun,?Thy Mayflower crossed the sea.
THE UNION?(_1917_)
You that have gathered together the sons of all races,?And welded them into one,?Lifting the torch of your Freedom on hungering faces?That sailed to the setting sun;
You that have made of mankind in your own proud regions?The music of man to be,?How should the old earth sing of you, now, as your legions?Rise to set all men free?
How should the singer that knew the proud vision and loved it, In the days when not all men knew,?Gaze through his tears, on the light, now the world has approved it; Or dream, when the dream comes true?
How should he sing when the Spirit of Freedom in thunder?Speaks, and the wine-press is red;?And the sea-winds are loud with the chains that are broken asunder And nations that rise from the dead?
Flag of the sky, proud flag of that wide communion,?Too mighty for thought to scan;?Flag of the many in one, and that last world-union?That kingdom of God in man;
Ours was a dream, in the night, of that last federation,?But yours is the glory unfurled--?The marshalled nations and stars that shall make one nation One singing star of the world.
GHOSTS OF THE NEW WORLD
"_There are no ghosts in America._"
There are no ghosts, you say,?To haunt her blaze of light;?No shadows in her day,?No phantoms in her night.?Columbus' tattered sail?Has passed beyond our hail.
What? On that magic coast,?Where Raleigh fought with fate,?Or where that Devon ghost?Unbarred the Golden Gate,?No dark, strange, ear-ringed men?Beat in from sea again?
No ghosts in Salem town?With silver buckled shoon??No lovely witch to drown?Or burn beneath the moon??Not even a whiff of tea,?On Boston's glimmering quay.
O, ghostly Spanish walls,?Where brown Franciscans glide,?Is there no voice that calls?Across the Great Divide,?To pilgrims on their way?Along the Santa Fe?
Then let your Pullman cars?Go roaring to the West,?Till, watched by lonelier stars,?The cactus lifts its crest.?There, on that painted plain,?One ghost will rise again.
Majestic and forlorn,?Wreck of a dying race,?The Red Man, half in scorn,?Shall raise his haughty face,?Inscrutable as the sky,?To watch our ghosts go by.
What? Is earth dreaming still??Shall not the night disgorge?The ghosts of Bunker Hill?The ghosts of Valley Forge,?Or, England's mightiest son,?The ghost of Washington?
No ghosts where Lincoln fell??No ghosts for seeing eyes??I know an old cracked bell?Shall make ten million rise?When one immortal ghost?Calls to the slumbering host.
THE OLD MEETING HOUSE
(_New Jersey, 1918_)
Its quiet graves were made for peace till Gabriel blows his horn. Those wise old elms could hear no cry?Of all that distant agony--?Only the red-winged blackbird, and the rustle of thick ripe corn.
The blue jay, perched upon that bronze, with bright unweeting eyes, Could never read the names that signed?The noblest charter of mankind;?But all of them were names we knew beneath our English skies.
And on the low gray headstones, with their crumbling weather-stains, --Though cardinal birds, like drops of blood,?Flickered across the haunted wood,--?The names you'd see were names that woke like flowers in English lanes.
John Applegate was fast asleep; and Temperance Olden, too.?And David Worth had quite forgot?If Hannah's lips were red or not;?And Prudence veiled her eyes at last, as Prudence ought to do.
And when, across that patch of heaven, that small blue leaf-edged space At times, a droning airplane went,?No flicker of astonishment?Could lift the heavy eyelids on one gossip's up-turned face.
For William Speakman could not tell--so thick the grasses grow-- If that strange humming in the sky?Meant that the Judgment Day were nigh,?Or if 'twas but the summer bees that blundered to and fro.
And then, across the breathless wood, a Bell began to sound, The only Bell that wakes the dead,?And Stockton Signer raised his head,?And called to all the deacons in the ancient burial-ground.
"The Bell, the Bell is ringing! Give me back my rusty sword. Though I thought the wars were done,?Though I thought our peace was won,?Yet I signed the Declaration, and the dead must keep their word.
"There's only one great ghost I know could make that 'larum ring. It's the captain that we knew?In the ancient buff and blue,?It's our Englishman, George Washington, who fought the German king!"
So the sunset saw them mustering beneath their brooding boughs, Ancient shadows of our sires,?Kindling with the ancient fires,?While the old cracked Bell to southward shook the ancient meeting house.
PRINCETON?(_1917_)
The first four lines of this poem were written for inscription on the first joint memorial to the American and British soldiers who fell in the Revolutionary War. This memorial was recently dedicated at Princeton.
I.
_Here Freedom stood, by slaughtered friend and foe,?And ere the