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And withdrawn prophetess, in Greece had set her pace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 boundThat 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 headFor 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 yearInto 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 bloodTo 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.