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Home  »  An American Anthology, 1787–1900  »  1606 From “An Ode in Time of Hesitation”

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By William VaughnMoody

1606 From “An Ode in Time of Hesitation”

ROBERT GOULD SHAW

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 despisëd men, with just-un-shackled 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.

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 dissoveëd 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.

“NO HINT OF STAIN”

WE are our fathers’ sons: let those who lead us know!

’T was only yesterday sick Cuba’s cry

Came up the tropic wind, “Now help us, for we die!”

Then Alabama heard,

And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho

Shouted a burning word;

Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred,

And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth,

East, west, and south, and north,

Beautiful armies. Oh, by the sweet blood and young

Shed on the awful hill slope at San Juan,

By the unforgotten names of eager boys

Who might have tasted girls’ love and been stung

With the old mystic joys

And starry griefs, now the spring nights come on,

But that the heart of youth is generous,—

We charge you, ye who lead us,

Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!

Turn not their new-world victories to gain!

One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays

Of their dear praise,

One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,

The implacable republic will require;

With clamor, in the glare and gaze of noon,

Or subtly, coming as a thief at night,

But surely, very surely, slow or soon

That insult deep we deeply will requite.

Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity!

For save we let the island men go free,

Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts

Will curse us from the lamentable coasts

Where walk the frustrate dead.

The cup of trembling shall be drainëd quite,

Eaten the sour bread of astonishment,

With ashes of the hearth shall be made white

Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent:

Then on your guiltier head

Shall our intolerable self-disdain

Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;

For manifest in that disastrous light

We shall discern the right

And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead,

Take heed!

Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.