The New Morning | Page 4

morning sun
The ship swept in from sea;

Gigantic towers arose, the night was done,
And--there stood

Liberty.
Silent, the great torch lifted in one hand,
The dawn in her proud eyes,

Silent, for all the shouts that vex her land,
Silent, hailing the skies;
Hailing that mightier Kingdom of the Blest
Our seamen sought of old,

The dream that lured the nations through the West,
The city of
sunset gold.
Saxon and Norman in one wedded soul
Shook out one flag like fire;

But westward, westward, moved the gleaming goal,
Westward, the
vast desire.
Westward and ever westward ran the call,
They followed the pilgrim
sun,
Seeking that land which should enfold them all,
And weld all
hearts in one.
Here on this mightier continent apart,
Here on these rolling plains,

Swells the first throb of that immortal heart,
The pulse of those huge
veins.
Still, at these towers, our Old-World cities jest,
And neither hear nor
see
The brood of gods at that gigantic breast,
The conquering race
to be.
Chosen from many--for no sluggard soul
Confronts that 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