AMERICA, bride of Change!
Thy cloistral hour is done;
Thy shy and innocent foot
Is white on the stranger’s stair:
Unto what end?—Beloved!
I have heard thee sigh.
As the heliotrope in the dusk
Close under, but unespied,
Delivers one slow breath,
Pained, poignant-sweet,
Into the neutral air,
Because she inly feels
At some light shock of a bud
That would issue forth, and expand,
How coronals fall, and old
Dear purples wither away;
(While the friendly leaves o’erhead
Moan, and the redwing there
Aches in his delicate sleep;)
Even so,
Freedom’s exempted flower!
In the rhythm, the interplay
Of the terrors of budding life
Or death,
I have heard thee sigh.
As the clear mid-channel wave,
That under a Lammas dawn
Her orient lanthorn held
Steady and beautiful,
Through the trance of the sunken tide,
Sudden leaps up, and spreads
Her signal round the sea:
Time, time!
Time to awake; to arm;
To scale the difficult shore!
Even so,
Thou Heart of the dual deep,
Ere the plash of the onset came,
In the vortices
I have heard thee sigh.
What if now
Thou failest, our saint, our star!
Between thy Father’s tomb,
And the throne of the glittering world,
The febrile world,
Calling,
Ah, Child! (have I lived too long?)
I have heard thee sigh.