OH, you young radicals and dreamers, You dauntless fledglings Who pass by my headstone, Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army And my faith in God! They are not denials of each other. Go by reverently, and read with sober care How a great people, riding with defiant shouts The centaur of Revolution, Spurred and whipped to frenzy, Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea Over the precipice they were nearing, And fell from his back in precipitate awe To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being. Moved by the same sense of vast reality Of life and death, and burdened as they were With the fate of a race, How was I, a little blasphemer, Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood, To remain a blasphemer, And a captain in the army? | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A SPIRITUAL by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR PRAIRIE VOICES by CHARLOTTE LOUISE BERTLESEN THE RANGE OF BEAUTY by HARRY RANDOLPH BLYTHE SONNET ON MOOR PARK: WRITTEN AT PARIS, MAY 10, 1825 by SAMUEL EGERTON BRYDGES ON A CERTAIN COMMEMORATION OF THOMSON by ROBERT BURNS SONG OF THE COLONISTS DEPARTING FOR NEW ZEALAND by THOMAS CAMPBELL LULLABY by JOHN WHITE CHADWICK |