Poetry content
11
The stars and stripes that in our standard fly,
Immortal symbols of the nation’s might,
The splendor of night’s orb-emblazoned sky,
The blue of day’s eternal depths—the white
Of Heaven’s peace and spotless purity,
And red of morn’s defiance-streaming light,
Meant nothing which that madcap State would heed,
Which vowed to spread vile slavery or secede.
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I stood where the contending armies bled—
A hundred thousand men on either side.
The past returned. Around me rose the dead,
The brazen bugles rang out far and wide;
The clouds of thund’rous battle round me spread
O’er lurid fields, where mighty chiefs did ride,
And ranks of serried steel swung into sight,
Flashing afar—an army in its might.
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And there was silence in the pulsing air,
While in the noon sun fluttered banners gay—
A lull that breathed the courage of despair;
A hush which meant a pause in which to pray,
There youths whose lives had never known a care
Confronted veterans with locks of aged gray;
Before the cool glare of the veteran,
The blue-eyed youth stood dauntless, man to man.
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Free labor still our country’s hope remains,—
In this our largest manhood shall be grown;
The spirit of vast woods and vaster plains,—
Canyons and geysers of the Yellowstone;
Alaskan summits, where bald winter reigns,
And rests on base of gold his icy throne,—
These all are prophecies of what shall be,
When Freedom’s sons shall leave their brothers free.
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Farewell, alas! my native land adored!
I’ve sung thy praises in a faithful strain;
But westward life’s imperial tides have poured,
Eddying in towns, and sweeping on again,
While braver hearts have in their strength ignored
The old South limitations which remain.
And I must leave the land which gave me birth,
Or pine, an alien, on my native hearth.
O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming;
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream;
’Tis the star-spangled banner; O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave;
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land,
Praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just.
And this be our motto— “In God is our trust;”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops,
swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the
post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black
wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his
place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a
dark night when lovers pass whispering.
An Old Sailor’s Lament.
(December, 1861.)
I have a feeling for those ships,
Each worn and ancient one,
With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam;
Ay, it was unkindly done.
But so they serve the Obsolete—
Even so, Stone Fleet!
You’ll say I’m doting; do but think
I scudded round the Horn in one—
The Tenedos, a glorious
Good old craft as ever run—
Sunk (how all unmeet!)
With the Old Stone Fleet.
An India ship of fame was she,
Spices and shawls and fans she bore;
A whaler when her wrinkles came—
Turned off! till, spent and poor,
Her bones were sold (escheat)!
Ah! Stone Fleet.
Four were erst patrician keels
(Names attest what families be),
The Kensington, and Richmond too,
Leonidas, and Lee:
But now they have their seat
With the Old Stone Fleet.
To scuttle them—a pirate deed—
Sack them, and dismast;
They sunk so slow, they died so hard,
But gurgling dropped at last.
Their ghosts in gales repeat
Woe’s us, Stone Fleet!
And all for naught. The waters pass—
Currents will have their way;
Nature is nobody’s ally; ’tis well;
The harbor is bettered—will stay.
A failure, and complete,
Was your Old Stone Fleet.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
(“No brass bands. No speeches. Instead a still, silent, effective influence.”—Anti-suffrage speech.)
We are waging—can you doubt it?
A campaign so calm and still
No one knows a thing about it
And we hope they never will.
No one knows
What we oppose,
And we hope they never will.
We are ladylike and quiet,
Here a whisper—there a hint;
Never speeches, bands or riot,
Nothing suitable for print.
No one knows
What we oppose,
For we never speak for print.
Sometimes in profound seclusion,
In some far (but homelike) spot,
We will make a dark allusion:
“We’re opposed to you-know-what.”
No one knows
What we oppose,
For we call it “You-Know-What.”