University of Virginia Library

1.

To greet the young Atlantis of the West
Strange gifts the Monarchs of the Old World sent:
The sighings of the hearts of their opprest,
Howlings and hungers of their hungriest,
And many a trampled truth, and foil'd intent,
And pining hope erewhile in prison pent,
Half-starving bodies and sore-stricken souls,
And every wretchedness the deep unrest
That shakes the sad shores of the Old World rolls
Ever and anon to drown in gulfs unguest,
—The wreeks of Time! And all these ruin'd things
The Witch-Queen of the Oceanides
Shaped into glorious forms of crownèd kings;
And to their sorrows gave she sovereignties
Upon the frontiers of the Future Time;
Where they sit throned, judging the Old World's crime.

2.

Yet did the Old World plague her on this wise:
Into the cradle of her childhood's sleep
It dropt a serpent's egg. And, ere her eyes
Were open'd, forth did the hatch'd reptile creep,
And breed a venomous brood of tyrannies,
Sloths, usurpations, ignominies, lies:
Which her yet-infant force, by fear, did keep
Subservient to their wicked witcheries.
These, when she stronger wax'd, and strove to rise
And set her foot upon the viperous heap
Of their infernal progeny, were wise
In the old wisdom of their Serpent Sire,
And, taught by Satan, tempted her desire
Of Power—to palter and to compromise
With Profit—by their poison-pouches brew'd
From human blood in human flesh black-hued
So that the Angel in her droopt his wing,
And sank into a sick and sullen swound;
And Gold was made her God, and Cain her King,
And Crime the crown wherewith her head was crown'd.
Until her reptile rulers wax'd secure
Of Sin's success, and pass'd the bitter bound
Of what God's patience suffers man to' endure;
Spat on the cheek their kiss had left impure,
Beat her, and left her bare to her distress.
But, hardier than the hooted lioness
When the net breaks,—stern mother of strong times,
She leapt to lordly life, and roll'd around
The lustrous orbs of her indignant scorn,
And rent her coward compact with the crimes
Of the Old World; which, deeming her forlorn
In that surpassing pang wherein she found
Surpassing strength, glad of man's loss stood by,
With spleenful sneer, and supercilious eye,
Scribbling on time's loose sands with crooked staff
Anticipations of her epitaph.
For, fool'd by its own wishful hate, it deem'd
Those pangs of her transcendent Second-Birth
To be the desperate death-throes of what seem'd
Her last wild hour. And the old kings o' the earth
Mock'd with their pointed sceptres, and made mirth.

3.

Then, in the dark of her shaked star's eclipse,
She caught and clung to that Omnipotent Hand
Which whoso holds stands fast, nor ever slips
Or strays, tho' darkness be on sea and land.
And Strength was given to her from Heaven, when Power
Proffer'd by Hell she spurn'd: strength to withstand
And stand. In that apocalyptic hour
Her might was inexhaustible by man,
(Even as the mythic horn, which ever flow'd,
Because the illimitable ocean
Forever at one end thereof abode)
For thro' her frame those heavenly forces ran
Whose fountain-head is the Eternal God.
Her fervid foot with fiery purpose shod
(Forged by strong Faith) the formidable field
Of frenzied Opposition firmly trod;
Tho' oft repulsed, returning oft, to yield
Of Freedom's heritage no hallow'd sod:
Nor ever drowsed she on her battle shield,
Till her supreme spear, red with traitorous blood,
Had slain the Serpent and his rebel brood.

4.

A Queen she is, tho' round her forehead shines
No semblance of the circlet of a crown;
Save what rare promise of rich sunrise twines
In her wild hair from splendours of its own.
High in the heaven of human hope her throne
Rises remote from us, whose orb declines
Down the dark slope of time,—remote and lone
In solitary light, as when afar
A crimson cloud, the pent sun's stormy zone,
Brightens the welkin; and belated signs
Are setting, and a sudden breeze is blown
About the shuddering stillness of the dawn:
Some sleep a heavy sleep, with curtain drawn
And shutter fast against whatever beams
Visit the dark; and unto them dawn's star
Is even as tho' it were not: some there are
That see and fear it; unto whom it seems
A portent prophesying woeful war,
And ruin to the world whereon it gleams,
The falling of long-fixèd faiths, the jar
Of jostled thrones, the flowing forth of streams
Whose fury Law's old limitary bar
Shall stem no more, the unsoldering of old schemes,
And foundering of old fabrics, splint and spar,
And trampling of tumultuary extremes
Which man's mild golden middle way shall mar:
But some, tho' few, that dream'd of it in dreams
And waked, believing, with unwearied eyes
To watch for the illumining of dark skies,
What time the skies were darkest, hail the sight
As haply herald of a long-wisht light.

5.

Little she heeds our welcome or our scorn.
The title-deeds of her immense command
She sues not from the signing of our hand.
Great Nature sign'd them when her child was born.
Great Nature guards them. They shall not be torn
From Nature's grasp. The inviolable land
Into whose spacious lap her affluent horn
Showers more wealth than e'er the unvalued sweat
Of serf and villain did of old beget
From the wrong'd earth, to appease the discontent
Of murtherous monarchies whose names are yet
On palaces and temples opulent,
She holds by Nature's, not by our, consent.
Her foot is on the Serpent she hath slain.
The wound is in her bosom, where he bit.
The red blood blossoms, as it drips from it,
To flowers that flourish best on battle plain;
Which, being pluckt, for sudden cures are fit;
Whose biting juices purge out many a stain.
Her cheek is flusht with fervour, not with pain.
Her eyes are beacon lights by Freedom lit.
And her strong forehead is severely knit
By somewhat of a newly-learn'd disdain
For the much mockery of our little wit.
About the fillet of her brows is writ
Humanity—sad word, oft sigh'd in vain
By weary lips of wretches doom'd to sit
Counting the links of Custom's cruel chain:
But on those lips of hers the sound thereof
Is even as tho' all laughters that had lain,
(Frozen by old Unwisdom's wintry scoff)
Long mute in Nature's mighty heart, leapt free
To join a new world's general jubilee.

6.

We, clinging to the present, in our fear
To front the future, miss the joy of both.
We praise the past, with praises insincere,
For what its loudest eulogists are loth
To emulate; whose supercilious sloth
Plays off, with hollow commendations drear,
The virtues and the valours that have ceased
To shape the conduct of mankind's career
Against whatever lives in living breast
Of virtue and of valour, striving here,
And striving now, to help man's imminent need,
And honour passèd worth by present deed.
We chuckle when they fall, who fight—or sink,
Who soar—or stumble, who strain forward still.
We know not what to do, nor what to think,
Save only to do nothing, and think ill
Of all things done. We peep about the brink
Of the full-flowing river of time, until
Some waning moon's wan influence, to fulfil
Our feeble hope, do chance to suck and shrink
The torrent wave we have not strength nor skill
Either to pass, or turn what way we will.
The winds of change afflict us. What to-day
We tether tight to-morrow whirls away.
That which our faith affirms our fear denies.
Our conscience cries to our convenience Nay.
The tides of things are flowing otherwise
Than with their wills on whom our doubt relies.
Their prophesyings Fate's fierce facts gainsay,
And Time's swift wisdom their slow wit belies,
Whose master is unmerciful surprise,
And their sad task, impossible delay.

7.

Therefore the ardours and the heats, that here
No flames enkindle from our altars cold,
The hopes which our inhospitable fear
Hoots into houseless space,—the manifold
Enthusiasms, Love sends forth to cheer
Each lusty champion that gives battle bold
In his glad cause,—the meanings and the aims
That move the mighty disc of Circumstance,
And that strong demiurgic faith, that frames
Foundations deeper than the drifts of chance,
Escape us—in the striving of the soul
Of poets, and the thinking of the thought
Of sages, and the yearning to its goal
Of that endeavouring Impulse, which hath brought
All things to what they are, nor pauses ever
Halfway to what they shall be; whose endeavour
Undoes our deedless doings. And all these
Are made the servants of the Destinies
Which, being our despots, are her ministers;
Who dips in the dim light of setting suns
The spacious skirts of that vast robe of hers
That widens ever in the wondrous West:
But on her sceptre shines the morning star,
Whereto she sings mysterious orisons.
In her large lap Jove's Bird hath built his nest;
And the great Ocean Stream orbicular
Goeth about to girdle her strong breast,
Whereto the nurseling hopes of Time are prest.

8.

A mightier wrong than the remorseless Greek,
In the sad decad of the woes of Troy,
Revenged what time he did his angers wreak
On grey-hair'd Priam and his Phrygian boy,
A loftier scorn than that of Thetis' son,
With nobler sword, redress'd on fiercer field:
A fairer prize than Helen's beauty won;
A haughtier foe than Hector forced to yield;
And left a theme, for larger Iliads fit
Than Homer sung, in legends yet unwrit.

9.

Then came the Old World's monarchs; who had sought
(Hoping that Hell might over Heaven prevail)
To crown the infernal foe wherewith she fought,
What time the fight was dubious,—crying, ‘All hail
‘Most sovereign lady! since thou didst not fail
In battle such as never was before,
Since when the Titans did the Gods assail.
For now thou art the Goddess we adore,
(Long vow'd to lift not whatsoever veil
Her Godhood wears) whose title is Success.
Therefore be witness of our willingness
To give thee welcome!’
But she answer'd not:
Who then was musing on man's faith in what
Her faith had won for man—Futurity.
That war was not as theirs, earth's anarchs old,
Mere barbarous battle for most brutal gain,
The slave's affliction and the tyrant's joy,
The making, not the breaking, of the chain
Which Hell's Ambition in his hand doth hold:
—But, for all human faith in human worth;
For man's most outraged hope in heavenly things;
For those high aspirations that go forth,
The holy souls of human sufferings,
To gladden God; for our afflicted Earth
And our forgotten Heaven; for whatsoe'er
Redeems the Past, making the Future fair,
The Present blameless; for the black man's flesh,
The white man's spirit; for Freedom, fluttering,
Caught in her first flight by the fowler's mesh,
With sullied feather and with broken wing;
For all sublime Ideas that cry to God,
Buried alive beneath earth's clumsy clod
Of sullen fact; and every noble thought;
—For these, not only for herself, she fought!
And theirs her victory is, not hers alone:
For they to help her in the conflict wrought.
Where'er the oppressor trembles at the groan
Of the opprest; wherever Truth is taught
To challenge Falsehood with undaunted tone;
Wherever a slave is made into a man,
And that man's flesh and blood are made his own;
Where what a poet dreams a people can
Resolve to achieve; wherever what hath been
A wish—scarce even a hope—in ages gone,
Begins to be a certainty clear-seen;
Wherever Justice widens Freedom's span;
Wherever right for all is wrong to none,
And fear in many is not force in one;
Wherever life assumes a lovelier mien;
Wherever Conscience is crown'd Custom's Queen;
Wherever good believed is good begun;
—The everlasting trophies she hath won
Shall stand unshaken by the storms of time,
Deep as man's heart, and as man's hope sublime.