Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE VIRGINIA SCAFFOLD; JOHN BROWN, DECEMBER 2, 1859, by EDNA DEAN PROCTOR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE VIRGINIA SCAFFOLD; JOHN BROWN, DECEMBER 2, 1859, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Rear on high the scaffold-altar! All the world will turn to see
Last Line: And his sowing find its reaping in the birthday of the free!
Alternate Author Name(s): Dean
Subject(s): Abolitionists; American Civil War; Brown, John (1800-1859); Slavery; Social Protest; U.s. - History; Anti-slavery; Serfs


REAR on high the scaffold-altar! all the world will turn to see
How a man has dared to suffer that his brothers may be free!
Rear it on some hillside looking North and South and East and West,
Where the wind from every quarter fresh may blow upon his breast,
And the sun look down unshaded from the chill December sky,
Glad to shine upon the hero who for Freedom dared to die!

All the world will turn to see him; — from the pines of wave-washed Maine
To the golden rivers rolling over California's plain,
And from clear Superior's waters, where the wild swan loves to sail,
To the Gulf-lands, summer-bosomed, fanned by ocean's softest gale —
Every heart will beat the faster in its sorrow or its scorn,
For the man nor courts nor prisons can annoy, another morn!
And from distant climes and nations men shall West-ward gaze and say,
'He who perilled all for Freedom on the scaffold dies to-day.'

Never offering was richer, nor did temple fairer rise
For the gods serenely smiling from the blue Olympian skies;
Porphyry or granite column did not statelier cleave the air
Than the posts of yonder gallows with the cross-beam waiting there;
And the victim, wreathed and crownèd, not for Dian nor for Jove,
But for Liberty and Manhood, comes, the sacrifice of Love.

They may hang him on the gibbet; they may raise the victor's cry
When they see him darkly swinging like a speck against the sky; —
Ah! the dying of a hero that the right may win its way,
Is but sowing seed for harvest in a warm and mellow May!
Now his story shall be whispered by the firelight's evening glow,
And in fields of rice and cotton when the hot noon passes slow,
Till his name shall be a watchword from Missouri to the sea,
And his sowing find its reaping in the birthday of the Free!





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