Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ODE FOR GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, by CONDE BENOIST PALLEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ODE FOR GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When youth, o alma mater, on the threshold / stood
Last Line: From their dust shall spring fresh bays to weave thy crown!
Subject(s): Georgetown University


I

When youth, O Alma Mater, on the threshold stood,
The hot thirst of fame within the blood,
And turned with longing eyes
To life's giant enterprise,
Under the gilded future's spell
Lightly we said farewell
To these dear scenes, and down yon narrow street,
With throbbing heart and hastening feet,
Sought the jostling throng
That o'er life's highway streams along:
Lightly we went, Hope in the van,
While life like music ran
Melodiously through heart and brain,
Each step a victory, each moment gain.
Lightly we went: but laden now
Return with deeper love blown to full flower
By riper knowledge of the absent hour:
And on this day of days,
When like a hundred stars upon thy brow
Thy hundred years in splendour blaze,
Lay at thy feet the tribute of our praise.
As dew wept down on leaf and flower, when morn
Grows tremulous within the east scarce born,
Mirrors in every crystal drop the radiant sun,
A thousand lesser lights reflecting one,
Our loves receive thy love's desire,
And myriad-fold return the sacred fire.

II

From distant lands, where in soft splendour beams
The Southern Cross through silent deeps of air,
Making a solemn glory of the night that seems
As though angelic choirs were chanting there;
From lands where winter's icy banners flare
Upon rude blasts blown down in roaring war
From solitudes beneath the polar star;
From lands where morning's earliest rays unbar
The gates of sleep to rouse the eager throng
With the keen note of industry's shrill song,
While slumbering cities into being start
And barter roars within the busy mart;
From lands where boundless prairie rolls along
In endless leagues, and towering summits leap
To cloudless heights above Pacific's deep,
Thy many sons assemble here
To greet thee in thy hundredth year
Of sweet maternity, and lay aside,
For this brief hour, the buckler and the spear,
As armèd knights were wont of old to bide
The truce of God, remembering Christ had died:—
From all life's walks we come in peace arrayed;
Where feverish Commerce plies the looms of trade
With ceaseless hum, and from the myriad ways
Of Law, whose justice-tempered ægis stays
And turns unbridled evil's reckless blade;
Where armed with new-found powers sage Galen's art
Arrests the fatal flight of Death's dread dart;
Where on the stormy seas of high debate
The Nation's wisdom guides the bark of state:
Where sweet Religion takes sublimer part
And drawing with her threefold cord above
Leads fallen nature up to perfect Love.
Yet not alone thy sons that here below
Lift the glad voice in jubilation's song,
Salute thee, but where Heaven's starry bow
Rounds the vast firmament with fire, a throng
Invisible, blest spirits once among
Thine earthly sons take up the great refrain,
Till all the blissful heights give back the strain,
That falls a benediction on thy head
From blessèd hands of thy belovèd dead;
And thy triumphant sons thence looking down
Flash on thy brow a spiritual crown,
A diadem of light, whose splendour rays
Immortal glory through eternal days!

III

When virgin Liberty yet stood
Within the dawn of maidenhood,
Upon these hills was fixed thy seat,
The home of truth, and learning's calm retreat
By blue Potomac's peaceful flood.
Scarce then had died the furious beat
Of rolling drum in loud alarm
Sounding the patriot's call to arm
Against the tyrant foe;
While yet the reeking sod was warm
With martyr blood spilt in the fearful throe
Of battle, and the trembling earth
Groaned in travail of a nation's birth,
Came the man of peace, who bore
The cross and laurel to the shore,
Where sweet Cohonguroton's waters pour,
And planted here the sacred tree.
And this was he
Of that same faith and race
With him who, taking up the bloodless steel
To make the Nation's woe or weal,
Alone of all the signers dared to trace
Not only his heroic name, but native place,
And with the dauntless front of Freedom's son
Wrote "Carroll of Carrollton!"
Rejoice in thy noble stem
And firm foundations wrought
When minion foes were taught
How priceless is the gem
Of Freedom bought
By patriot steel in patriot hands
Against a narrow tyrant's slavish bands!
Around thy cradle blew the trumpet blast
Of victory, when Liberty at last
Burst the chains that held her bound,
And all the land leaped at the glorious sound,
And from the dragon-jaws of Strife
A Nation sprang to life,
Strong-limbed and beautiful in power
Through mighty wrestling in that heavy hour!
Around thy cradle redolent
Breathed the fresh fragrance of the spring
Of Freedom, and its vigour blent
With thine own blood, and sent
Thy pulses dancing to the swing
Of music born in prophecy
Of all the glory yet to be!

IV

A century has rolled its solemn tide
Along the Nation's path, and by thy walls
The generations ebbed and died,
Fallen in the waste of time, as falls
Yon river to the distant sea—
And lo! the promise of thine infancy!
A stately palace rears its tower-capped height
Upon thy hills, truth's templed shrine,
Shedding, like a beacon light,
Its welcome rays across the brine
To outward speeding ships that brave
Midmost ocean's storm-beat wave,
Or homeward struggling barks that creep
To haven from the warring deep.
Beneath thy roof-tree's sheltering span,
Science deep in Nature's various plan
From lifeless dust to living man,
Houses all her lore; and Art with eyes,
Within whose depths all beauty mirrored lies
As in calm waters summer skies,
Kindles at thy hearth her living flame;
And with thee dwells the gentle Dame,
Whose smile upon the exile's wandering path
Like light soothed time-worn Dante's bitter wrath,
Divine Philosophy, that strikes the trembling strings
To the deep note that vibrates from the sum of things!

V

"Not all I am shall die!"
Was the Roman poet's cry.
Though now no conjuring priest
Leads the fattened beast
To the smoking altar, and the pride
Of Rome lies buried in her dust,
Not all, O Bard, has died,
And thou hast conquered in the larger trust:
Here where learning holds her seat,
New-born generations greet
Thee, crowning with fresh bays
The triumphs of those elder days.
Nor thou alone of Greek or Roman line
Find'st here a temple and a shrine;
The stately Mantuan,
Who sang the Arms and Man,
Ovid, whose melting lines in amorous flow
Like torrid rivers ran,
The silver-worded Cicero,
The buskined muse of Sophocles
And trumpet-tongued Demosthenes,
Old Homer, whose heroic strain
Bade gods and men contend on Troia's fatal plain,—
All, all the mighty train,
Who made the heart and brain
Of ancient letters, and who sent,
As fountains of the firmament,
The impetuous crystal flood
Of their rich speech into the blood
Of nations yet within the womb,
Find here a wider reign
Than universal Rome could claim!
Ye quickening powers! no Stygian gloom
Can quench the vital flame
That breathes its glory round the classic name!
Not dead, but living voices of the past,
Not dead and to be cast
Like blank annals of barbarian kings
Into the void of forgotten things,
But living souls with power to reach
The human heart in human speech
And bind the generations each to each,
Leaping the centuries and giving breath
To ancient forms snatched back from empty death,
Till man in that large sympathy of mind
Begot by wide communion with his kind,
Across the age's broadening span
Responsive greets his fellow-man!
Not death, but life prevails, and though men's lives
Drop off the stem like ripened fruit,
Death reaps not all, the seed survives
To strike in other soil the living root;
So generations gathering up the past,
Each reaps a widening profit from the last,
And from the seed by others sown
Wears the flower of wisdom as its own.

VI

Splendour of poet's song, the living light
Of letters across the night
Of ages fled, Science begirt with power
To build a universe from every flower
That blows, and Wisdom's glowing height,
Whence the eagle mind may gaze
Into the sun of truth's full blaze,
Are not all the glories of thy house;
These are thine by that high right
Which Nature's self allows
To those who consecrate their days
To Learning's thorn-strewn ways:
A light of still more constant glow,
A flame sprung from a purer fire
Than aught of human can inspire,
Sheds its clear radiance on thy brow;
A glory and a light that first
Rose from Manresa's cave, and burst
In fiery splendour on a wondering world,
When meek Loyola's hand unfurled
His holy standard blazoned with the line,
"The glory be not ours, O Lord, but thine!"
O happy issue of Pamplona's war,
When sank a warrior's earthly star,
Not quenched, but with rekindled beam to rise
And shed celestial fires from other skies!
Where Error rears its crested pride
Against the spotless bride
Of Truth, Loyola's flashing blade descends
Upon the mailèd casque, and rends
The stubborn visor, laying bare
The serpent face that lurked in hiding there;
With steady front against the swarming foe
Manresa's knight rains down the deadly blow,
As on the bloody field of Tours, Martel
With thundering mace smote down the infidel!
No carnal weapons wields he in his fight,
For his a spiritual sword of light,
Forged in the glowing smithies of the soul,
By Love attempered and by Truth made whole;
No carnage reddens his victorious way,
He combats to give life and not to slay,
And like the hero fabled to our youth,
He smites giant Error to free the princess Truth.
Still other conquests wait the black-robed knight,
In other fields to wage the sacred fight:
See Xavier come, a burning brand
Of love to distant India's sun-scorched strand,
And as a flame consumed by its own fire
His wasted frame in ardent love expire:
Beneath our skies behold Loyola's band,
When pagan night yet palled the distant land,
With martyr toil the savage waste explore
From distant Maine to far Pacific's shore,
Christ in the heart and crucifix in hand:
No terrors daunt, no lawless wild appals
Where love of souls the saintly hero calls,
But onward through the trackless waste before,
His fearless steps first tread the virgin sod,
And consecrate a new-found world to God!

VII

These, O Alma Mater, are thy bays,
Thy coronal of praise,
Wherewith thy hundred years are crowned;
These the morning stars that rise
To fill with golden light the skies
That circle thy first cycle round;
These the immortal fires that know
No setting in heaven's wide expanse,
But kindle with an ever brighter glow
As years in crystal floods advance:
We who stand upon the shore,
And watch the impetuous flow
Of time's river onward pour
Into the future's formless sea,
Dimly dream the glory yet to be;
As in the gateways of the morn,
When the waning stars are shorn
Of their soft splendours, day is born,
And the shimmering east grows white
With the upward creeping light
Against the westward flying night,
We divine the glory still concealed
By the beauty half revealed.
Thy hundred years upon thy cheek
Glowing with perennial truth,
Sit like the first flush of youth;
Nor envious Time may wreak
His wrinkled vengeance on thy brow,
And his harsh furrows plough
To mark the rugged path
Of his relentless wrath.
And when our days have measured out their span
To the last limit of the thread,
And we join Death's wan caravan
To the shoreless regions of the dead,
His dread shade shall have no power
To blight the blossom of the flower
That wreathes thy head;
But as the generations pass
Like phantoms in Time's darkened glass,
And ages in the ever-widening void go down,
From their dust shall spring fresh bays to weave thy crown!





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