Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SONG OF THE UPRISING, by JAMES OPPENHEIM


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SONG OF THE UPRISING, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Joy wings his way
Last Line: New man is born from the old: joy shall leap laughing from sorrow.
Subject(s): Death; Happiness; Dead, The; Joy; Delight


I -- Joy

Joy wings his way,
-- (O bells of heaven!)
Joy wings his irresistible way,
-- (O winds, O sun!)
Joy wings his irresistible, his radiant, his ineluctable way,
-- (Morning! morning of the winds,
Morning strong with song!)
Joy wings, wings, wings his way
And now the wild great song of dawn
Mounts heaven on beams of light
Scattering the dew in the path of the veering bee,
And from the house the girl and boy bare-headed
Come fresh from sleep
And lift young voices toward blue skies . . .

Lift young voices toward blue skies
Meeting the young god, Joy.

Joy is the carrier of news . . .
He laughs over the battlefields . . .
Joy is the sun . . .
He shines on the democracies . . .
Joy is exultant with tidings . . .
He flings on the Earth in the road of the hosts the luminous flame of the future
. . .
O the Earth, it is bled,
It is black, clawed with death,
But victory, but victory, but irrepressible victory
Shouts from the lips of Joy
Who shall raise up the dead.

I will make a prophecy
To your swelling heart,
That the heavens open
Presently with Peace . . .
I will make a prophecy of glory
To your dark-swelling heart . . .
The peoples shall be one,
The Earth shall be our home,
The children shall lead us forth with a scattering of roses,
And the heavens in all their splendor of stars shall sing: "One people, one
planet."

O my heart!
How wonderful is the age we dwell in . . .
We are climbing up on the new tableland of man,
Beyond cedars of sorrow, beyond hemlocks of lamentation,
There where the grass blows wild,
There where the oak and the maple sway in the wind,
There where the festival is held, and the sun gleams on the steel of the
workshops . . .
Gleams on the steel and on the miraculous flesh of men's faces . . .

(Hear, O softly, O faintly, sweetly,
Hear the cooing murmur of the mothers,
The lisp of laughing babes,
The bird-like love-notes, the lark-like mate-calls
Of passionate girls and boys,
And hear, hear,
Voices of men together in workshops where work is glory.)
Truly triumphant from the massive enginery of destruction and battle
Where great guns leveled Louvain and rifled Europe of grandeur,
Truly triumphant out of the thunder-roar, the tempest-shriek, the hurricane-
blast,
Out of the horrible bleeding of boys,
Out of the torrents of blood,
Out of the anguish of countless hearts,
Truly triumphant the saved shall stand and march with a blowing of the trump
And march with a throbbing of the drum
Heroic and renewed to the lands of the new age . . .

They shall march! --
(O Joy, thou news-bringer!)
They shall march! --
(O Joy, thou sun in the windy heavens!)
They shall march! --
(O Joy, thou art approaching beamed with the glory of the free!)
They shall march, they shall sing, they shall swing with radiant ranks,
Down the fields, down the streets, down the continental roads,
They shall march, they shall ship, they shall fly on the planes of rejoicing,
They shall be one mass of triumph in the peace that crowneth all.

II -- Darkness

Death darkens, darkens . . .
-- (O cry of breakers!)
Death darkens, darkens on the deeps . . .
-- (O rocks, O sea!)
Death darkens, darkens on the moving, the interminable deeps . . .
-- (Midnight! midnight of no stars!
Midnight bowed with cloud!)
Death darkens, darkens, darkens,
And the wild blown dirges of the sea
Break into lamentation,
Break into anguish on the rocks, on the sands, on the dunes,
Wail along the dunes, weep along the dunes,
And the sea cries,
And the wind skims the sea-tides with an empty moaning,
And the clouds crowd together dropping their tears upon the war-bled world . . .

O the black midnight!
Winds howl and sand blows,
The broom wails and snaps and the breakers burst writhing . . .
O the blackness of this midnight . . .

Must I walk these shores, lost in grief?
Must I walk these stormy shores at the salt fringes of the tragic sea
In a vision of the human Earth I tread,
In a vision of an Earth of men and women
Stripped and maimed,
Trapped and slain, --
Must I walk these naked shores, dreadfully, slowly, stricken in my heart?

Unbearable sorrow!
Fiendish anguish!
Among the old that line the streets, among the faded and the war-worn,
Radiant miles of youth glow by, laughing with the bugles,
Radiant rivers of youth flow by,
Flow into the trenches . . .
I see the Hell they have entered with its pitiless flame-fledged skies,
With its mud and stenchent carrion, with the murderer and the murdered . . .
I see the Hell they have entered and the radiance gone out . . .
O my heart . . .
How terrible is the age we dwell in . . .
None . . . none . . . none
Shall assuage great grief . . .
None . . . none . . . none
Shall restore the lost to us . . .
Roll, muffled drums, you heart-beats of despair,
Boom, O you brass, for the burial of our boys.

I have mounted midnight
To gaze in the abyss,
In the midst of heaven
Hangs a red, red heart . . .
I have mounted mournful midnight
To gaze in the abyss,
And I have seen that red heart
Dripping drops of blood . . .
That heart is the Earth,
In the darkness it hangs red,
In the darkness it bleeds red with human grief and anguish . . .

But is not the Earth as a husk of beauties and glories and powers
Which stripped, reveals the kernel, the naked body of man?
Is not man her consummate miracle?
Is he not strong with engines and strong with song?
Can he be this beast of the jungle?
Can he be this darkness-maker?
Has his great past opened only in this?

Sea of the interminable tides,
Sea, of dirges and of moving deeps, and of darkened song,
I will turn from you, I will call the beloved of my heart . . .
Turn and call her, that in her face
I may read of youth's betrayal,
And the treason of the strong . . .

They have betrayed us . . .
(Silence, you false seas!)
They have betrayed us . . .
(Silence, you lying dirge-singing seas!)
They have betrayed us . . .
(Silence, you seas awash with ignoble anguish!)
They have betrayed us, they have sold us, they have carried off our youth
To the slaughter, to the murder, to the deepest pits of Hell,
They have betrayed us, they are traitors, we shall rise against their power,
We shall shake the Earth with tumult and the thunders of Revolt.

III -- The Call

Whither goest thou, beautiful and beloved, O Earth,
Whither goest thou?

Dawn is not yet:
We sit in a cranny of the eastward rocks of the mountain-top;
Among shapes of the wind, shadows of the stars, and the Earth darker than the
skies.
O my beloved,
Your hands are warm in my own, your hair blows against my cheek:
You are glimmering beside me, your eyes bright with the wild animal:
We are of the darkness of Earth dipped in the eddying gleam of the heavens:
We taste the freshness of wind-blown pines.
Vastness . . . ten stars are gone . . .
Grayness . . . the Earth sighs . . .
Twilight . . . the East twinkles . . .

O rise, my beloved, rise, for the runners of the sun
Appear with their bugles upon the mountains and blow long blasts of light
Swelling and shattering Night . . .
Rise, we must meet the miracle . . . Dawn's joy swells:
Stirring, Earth tosses her covers of the dark aside,
Laughing, leaps from her bed: naked, bathes in the dew . . .
Look, where the peeping chimney smokes, look, the grey lake,
Listen . . . the waking!
Birds are fluttering, brooks are babbling, leaves are dancing, woodfolk scurry
. . .
The color of the dawn
Scattered, drowns in blue . . .

We are blown on the topmost rock,
We cannot be still . . .
Your hair, my beloved, is a golden gale,
Your lips are cold . . .
Look to the East, behold . . .
Look -- gold . . .
Pure gold, flame gold, growing, emboldening gold!
Mark!
The sons of light --
The sons of light charge heaven on golden gallopers,
And struck out of fire, with song,
The morning star is born --
The morning star is born -- the sun, the sun -- Day!
Ecstasy! splendor!
Wild are white waters!
Songs from the birds burst, shouts from our lips rise . . .
In abandon, unburdened, we dance, dance . . .
We are beams of the morning sun,
We are blowing pines of the peak,
And sunrise
Bursts through these human bodies,
Sunrise
Leaps through these singing bodies,
Sunrise
Dances along the blood, and opens in our hearts
The secret of Man's glory: the thrill of what Life is.

(A shadow crosses the sun . . .
The Earth grows grey below us . . .
We are hushed of a sudden, and chilled . . .
Doubt . . . dread.)

Whither goest thou, darkened and solemn, O Earth,
Whither goest thou?

Is there then, beloved, no forgetting of sorrow?
Must there be pausing for lamentation?
Is there an hour for cedars?
Shall the drums roll for the lost and the bugles blow for the dead?

I heard a voice say: None,
None shall heal empty arms.
I heard a voice say: None,
None shall assuage great grief . . .
For he is dead, whose young lips
She kissed in the intervals of song . . .
-- In the intervals of song . . .
Death darkens, darkens,
(O cry of breakers!)
Death darkens, darkens on the deeps,
(O rocks, O sea!)
Death steals into the ecstasy of life,
Steals in, snatches the loved ones, and leaves bereaved hearts . . .

It is Man who darkens,
It is Man himself who darkens his own world,
Who has misused his gift,
Who has turned the upward vision downward,
Whose greed devours, whose passion sinks back to the beast beneath his
humanness,
Whose treasure becomes engines of death, and his song a shriek . . .

O Man, what hast thou wrought?
How hast thou scarred the beautiful slopes of thy planet with gun-pocked havoc,
And how excoriated thy divine body with blasting anguish?
How from thy glories hast thou turned to maim and slay thine own?
O enemy of thyself! O mad beast! O stupid fiend!

Thou hast made thy living valleys, thy mass-pent cities, thy human plains
Red with unneeded agony and black with burnt ruins . . .
In mill and trench thy peoples moan,
The cry rises of betrayed multitudes,
Thou hast made Earth sick and a stench and a place of cinders . . .
Thou hast wrought a glory and put it to the torch . . .

Beloved, beloved,
How can we abide on the mountain of our joy
Where even touched with sunrise we quiver through invisible nerves to the ends
of Earth,
And the agony of man darkens our dawn . . .
We must descend into the pit of a thousand million outstretched imploring hands,
The pit of bloody faces, and wailing lips . . .
Down to the sorrow of Earth,
The anguish of Man.

For Earth, like a staring maniac, bearing a firebrand,
Goes shrieking down the skies,
Shrieking "Famine," shrieking "Pestilence," shrieking "War" . . .
That orb of destruction burns balefully in the august magnificence of night . .
.
The mad world runs amuck . . .
Is Man ending himself?
Is the miracle of that mind and passion which dreamed and built Asia and Europe
Stopped in suicidal madness?
Beloved, were we born to see this, and to live this?
Are we among the doomed?

The doomed! the doomed!
Where shall we flee? Where shall we hide our heads?
There is no corner of the storm that is still . . .
The wind blows us into the whirlpool.
O cities crashing about us, O ships gone down,
O the wounded and the dying,
O the bereaved, the bereaved!
Deluge of death! Day of the last judgment!
The heavens open, the dazzling Judge calls the multitudes of peoples before him,
The thunder rolls, the lightning bares those livid faces, the doom is given . .
.
The Earth cracks asunder:
Darkness . . .
Death . . .

(Yet -- what song is in my heart?
O has the mother heard the stir of life in her side?
Is there the faint, the tremulous stir of the unborn?)

Lift up your heads, O ye gates,
And be ye uplift, you everlasting doors . . .
The glory of the Lord is risen upon us . . .
We shall not bend before the storm: we shall not how before great death:
We put the darkness from us with a loud shout:
We put the temptation of despair away with resolution:
We arise: we arise clothed in courage:
We arise: we are that which has refused darkness: we are MAN . . .
MAN, the fire-bringer,
MAN, the Creator.

We call mountain to mountain . . .
We raise a torch of Revolution . . .
We bring forth the peoples out of their darkness
And the nations out of their wrath . . .
We behold the Earth in parturition . . .
We see the Mother in birth-throes . . .
We greet the child with calls of welcome and the sound of cities of joy . . .

O, blow, you bugles, with triumph,
O, shout, you peoples, with victory . . .
Hurl down the mighty from their seats,
And raise yourselves to freedom . . .
Raise up yourselves, ye slaves and chained ones,
Raise up yourselves, ye toiling peoples . . .
Be upraised, ye sorrowers and ye spent ones,
Get up on the peaks of the morning and proclaim the triumph of Man,
The victory of Man,
Get up on the peaks of the morning and greet the child, the New Age,
On tablelands of democracy,
On heights of man, the creator,
Get ye up, get ye up, get ye up, ye triumphing peoples . . .
New Man is born from the Old: Joy shall leap laughing from Sorrow.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net