Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE HEROS OF OREGON by CINCINNATUS HEINE MILLER

Poet Analysis

First Line: I STAND UPON THE GREEN SIERRA'S WALL
Last Line: AGAINST HIS CITY'S FATE. A FLAME! HIS CITY YIELDS.
I stand upon the green Sierra's wall;
Against the east, beyond the yellow grass,
I see the broken hill-tops lift and fall,
Then sands that shimmer like a sea of glass. . .
There lies the nation's great high road of dead.
Forgotten aye, unnumbered, and, alas!
Unchronicled in deed or death; instead,
The new aristocrat lifts high a lordly head.

My brave and unremember'd heroes, rest;
You fell in silence, silent lie and sleep.
Sleep on unsung, for this, I say, were best:
The world today has hardly time to weep;
The world today will hardly care to keep
In heart her plain and unpretending brave.
The desert winds, they whistle by and sweep
About you; brown'd and russet grasses wave
Along a thousand leagues that lie one common grave.

The proud and careless pass in palace car
Along the line you blazon'd white with bones;
Pass swift to people, and possess and mar
Your lands with monuments and letter'd stones
Unto themselves. Thank God! this waste disowns
Their touch. His everlasting hand has drawn
A shining line around you. Wealth bemoans
The waste your splendid grave employs. Sleep on,
No hand shall touch your dust this side of God and dawn.

I let them stride across with grasping hands
And strive for brief possession; mark and line
With lifted walls the new divided lands,
And gather growing herds of lowing kine.
I could not covet these, could not confin
My heart to one; all seem'd to me the same,
And all below my mountain home, divine
And beautiful, held in another's name,
As if the herds and lands were mine,
All mine, or his, all beautiful the same.

I have not been, shall not be, understood;
I have not wit, nor will, to well explain,
But that which men call good I find not good.
The lands the savage held, shall hold again,
The gold the savage spurn'd in proud disdain
For centuries; go, take them all; build high
Your gilded temples; strive and strike and strain
And crowd and controvert and curse and lie
In church and State, in town and citadel, and. . . die.

And who shall grow the nobler from it all?
The mute and unsung savage loved as true --
He felt, as grateful felt, God's blessings fall
About his lodge and tawny babes as you
In temples, -- Moslem, Christian, infidel, or Jew.
. . . The sea, the great white, braided, bounding sea,
Is laughing in your face; the arching blue
Remains to God; the mountains still are free,
A refuge for the few remaining tribes and me.

Your cities! from the first the hand of God
Has been against them; sword and flood and flame,
The earthquake's march, and pestilence, have trod
To undiscerning dust the very name
Of antique capitals; and still the same
Sad destiny besets the battle-fields
Of Mammon and the harlot's house of shame.
Lo! man with monuments and lifted shields
Against his city's fate. A flame! his city yields.



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