The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century by William Lyon Phelps

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The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century by William Lyon Phelps
Book, page 221 / 248

   Remember, as the flaming car
     Of ruin nearer rolls,
   That of our country's substance are
     Our bodies and our souls.

   Her dust we are, and to her dust
     Our ashes shall descend:
   Who craves a lineage more august
     Or a diviner end?

   By blessing of her fruitful dews,
     Her suns and winds and rains,
   We have her granite in our thews,
     Her iron in our veins.

   And, sleeping in her sacred earth,
     The ever-living dead
   On the dark miracle of birth
     Their holy influence shed....

   So, in the faith our fathers kept,
     We live, and long to die;
   To sleep forever, as they have slept,
     Under a sunlit sky;

   Close-folded to our mother's heart
     To find our souls' release--
   A secret coeternal part
     Of her eternal peace;--

   Where Hood, Saint Helen's and Rainier,
     In vestal raiment, keep
   Inviolate through the varying year
     Their immemorial sleep;

   Or where the meadow-lark, in coy
     But calm profusion, pours
   The liquid fragments of his joy
     On old colonial shores.

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