@3No Roebling reared that primal way With web of steel and splendid line; Its piers were rubble, crude and gray, Its beams were hewn of forest pine. Across the kill that eastward flowed It led, unjarred by rumbling tram, Where grasses waved and lilies glowed; New York was then Nieuw Amsterdam. With rake and scythe at droop of day, With lilt and carol full and free, The maids and younkers hold their way Along the shadowed Bouwerie. A playful whisper stirs the trees, A laughing ripple rills the shoal, For here, as village law decrees, The sweetest lips must pay the toll. Good Saint that loved our isle, restore That hallowed bridge, to span a tide With blowing fields on either shore; Let me be there with one beside! Dispel this cloud of stone and steel, These clogging mists of tawdry sham! Let lips be frank and hearts be leal As then in old Nieuw Amsterdam!@1 | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE RAND MCNALLY ATLAS by KAREN SWENSON FETES GALANTES: ROMANCES SANS PAROLE, SELECTION by PAUL VERLAINE THE WITCH by MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE FOR THAT HE LOOKED NOT UPON HER by GEORGE GASCOIGNE THE OLD SCHOOL HOUSE by ALEXANDER ANDERSON TWELVE SONNETS: 2 by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) STRANGE PERSPECTIVE by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN THE GEOGRAPHER'S GLORY; OR, THE GLOBE IN 1730 by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |