There is a vision, Celia, in your face.... Beauty had lived in India like a mad
And withdrawn prophetess, in Greece had set her pace
Between a laurelled lad
And a singing maiden, pitched her purple tents
In Rome, leaned with a mother’s fears
In Bethlehem to nurse a son of God upon her breast
And learned the tender loneliness of tears,
Awhile had hid in Europe, sad
In the shadow of magnificence,
Brooding, finding no rest,
And then of a sudden she had run forth from her hiding-place,
Rejoicing, desperate, intense
Against her enemy, a rod
Of fire in her hand, her tresses crowned
With liberty, her purpose bold and bound
That every son should be a son of God.
And then she wept for France.... But once more clad
In stars, she beckons to America, the land
Of hope. Behold her stand
With her bright finger scorning armaments
And on her lips the unconquerable common sense
Of love calling the world to challenge and confound
The empty idols of her enemy!
... Comforter of experience,
Enlightener of old events,
Beauty forever dares to widen and retrace
Her way, singing the marches of democracy,
Carrying banners of the time to be,
Calling companions to her high command.
There is a banner, Celia, in your hand! Though sons, whose fathers bled
For freedom, struggle now instead
With heavier weapons and with weary-waking head
For bread;
Though sons, whose fathers fought in other ages
For fame, bear in their hearts today the scar
Of entering where the laborer sleeps
And rousing him with masterly inquiry where he keeps
His wages:
Though all the cunning coil of trade appear a baser thing
Than battles are,
O trace through time the orbit of this troubled star!
... See, from afar off, how the valiant few
Of old, each with a helmet on his head,
Practiced their inconclusive feud
Upon no battlefield of unfeeling dew—
But on the prostrate stillness of the multitude!
Even their knightliest prowess they must rear,
Tamerlane, Alexander, Arthur, every king,
Upon the common clay from which they spring.
For see how slaves, on whom war falls, renew
The strength of war and disappear
Year after year
Into the earth—fulfilling it to form and bear
Democracy!
Look nearer now along the modern sky
And watch where every man fastens the electric wing
Upon his foot, that he may leave his little sod
Of ignorance!
And look where, by and by,
Taking his high inheritance,
He knows himself and other men as the winged self of God!
The times are gone when only few were fit
To view with open vision the sublime,
When for the rest an altar-rail sufficed
To obscure the democratic Christ....
Perceiving now his gift, demanding it,
The benison of common benefit,
Men, women, all,
Interpreters of time,
Have found that lordly Christ apocryphal
While Christ the comrade comes again—no wraith
Of virtue in a far-off faith
But a companion hearty, natural,
Who sorrows with indomitable eyes
For his mistreated plan
To share with all men the upspringing sod,
The unfolding skies—
Not God who made Himself the Man,
But a man who proved man’s unused worth—
And made himself the God.
Once you had listened, Celia, to a stream
And lain a long time, silent as a sleeper.
And then your word arrived as from beyond
Your body, bending with its breath the frond
Of a fern. You whispered to the listening stream:
“As evil is yet wider than we dream,
So good is deeper.” ...
O how I try to bring
Your voice to say in mine that word!—to sing
Clear-hearted as a mountain-spring
Of the wonders we see deepening!
Time cannot bury what the blest have thought,
For there is resurrection far and near.
Often it seems as though a single day had brought
To each bright hemisphere
Courage to cast
The servitude
And blinded glory of the past
Away and in a flash had taught
Purpose and fortitude....
But not so swiftly are we wrought.
By many single days we learn to live,
By many flashes read the vision clear
That every heart is equal debtor
To its own and every breast
For the good before the better,
The better toward the best.
When we who hugged awhile the golden bowl
Of greed behold it now a sieve
Through which is drained invisibly
A nectar we were saving for the soul,
Then not in vain have many gone
The empty ways of stealth
Seeking a firmer base than honesty
For building happiness upon....
And by the ancient agonizing test
We have slowly guessed
That a just portion of the whole
Is all there is of wealth.
When those who labor wake
And care ...
And through the tingling air
A dead man’s voice, by living men renewed
And women, dares democracy
To self-respect: “Open the lands! Let mankind share
The ample livelihood they bear!”—
Then not in vain have the poor known distress,
Teaching the rich that happiness
Is something no man may—possess.
Little by little we, whose fathers fought
Impassioned, are ashamed
Of the familiar thought
That waste of blood is honourable feud:
Little by little from the wondering land
The agitation and the lie of war
Shall pass; for in the heart disclaimed
Murder shall be abandoned by the hand.
And while there grows a fellowship of unshed blood
To stop the wound and heal the scar
Of time, with sudden glorious aptitude
Woman assumes her part. Her pity in a flood
Flings down the gate.
She has been made to wait
Too long, undreaming and untaught
The touch and beauty of democracy.
But, entering now the strife
In which her saving sense is due,
She watches and she grows aware,
Holding a child more dear than property,
That the many perish to empower the few,
That homeless politics have split apart
The common country of the human heart.
(Your heart is beating, Celia, like a song!)
.... For man has need
Not merely of the lips that kiss and hands that feed
But of the hearts that heed
And of the minds that speed
Like rain.
Loving a mother or a wife,
Let him release her tenderness, to make him strong,
And use her beauty and receive her law:
The very life of life.
In temporary pain
The age is bearing a new breed
Of men and women, patriots of the world
And one another. Boundaries in vain,
Birthrights and countries, would constrain
The old diversity of seed
To be diversity of soul.
O mighty patriots, maintain
Your loyalty!—till flags unfurled
For battle shall arraign
The traitors who unfurled them, shall remain
And shine over an army with no slain,
And men from every nation shall enroll
And women—in the hardihood of peace!
What can my anger do but cease?
Whom shall I fight and who shall be my enemy
When he is I and I am he?
Let me have done with that old God outside
Who watched with preference and answered prayer,
The Godhead that replied
Now here, now there,
Where heavy cannon were
Or coins of gold!
Let me receive communion with all men,
Acknowledging our one and only soul!
For not till then
Can God be God, till we ourselves are whole.