Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MOUNT HOPE, by WILLIAM AUGUSTUS CROFFUT


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MOUNT HOPE, by                    
First Line: I stroll through verdant fields to-day
Last Line: O, that this blossom had a tongue to tell its woe!
Alternate Author Name(s): Croffut, W. A.
Subject(s): Mount Hope, Rhode Island; Philip, King (native American Chief); Metacomet; King Philip's War (1675-76)


I STROLL through verdant fields to-day,
Through waving woods and pastures sweet,
To the red warrior's ancient seat
Where liquid voices of the bay
Babble in tropic tongues around its rocky feet.

I put my lips to Philip's spring;
I sit in Philip's granite chair;
And thence I climb up, stair by stair,
And stand where once the savage king
Stood and with eye of hawk cleft the blue round of air.

On Narragansett's sunny breast
This necklace of fair islands shone,
And Philip, muttering, "All my own!"
Looked north and south and east and west,
And waved his sceptre from this alabaster throne.

His beacon on Pocasset hill,
Lighting the hero's path to fame
Whene'er the crafty Pequot came,
Blazed as the windows of you mill
Now blaze at set of sun with day's expiring flame.

Always, at midnight, from a cloud,
An eagle swoops, and hovering nigh
This peak, utters one piercing cry
Of wrath and anguish, long and loud,
And plunges once again into the silent sky!

The Wampanoags, long since dead,
Who to these islands used to cling,
Spake of this shrieking midnight thing
With bated breath, and, shuddering, said,
"'T is angry Philip's voice, -- the spectre of the king!"

All things are changed. Here Bristol sleeps
And dreams within her emerald tent;
Yonder are picnic tables bent
Beneath their burden; up the steeps
The martial strains arise and songs of merriment.

I pluck an aster on the crest;
It is a child of one, I know,
Plucked here two hundred years ago,
And worn upon the slave-queen's breast, --
O, that this blossom had a tongue to tell its woe!





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