A Word for the Hour

The firmament breaks up. In black eclipse

Light after light goes out. One evil star,

Luridly glaring through the smoke of war,

As in the dream of the Apocalypse,

Drags others down. Let us not weakly weep

Nor rashly threaten. Give us grace to keep

Our faith and patience; wherefore should we leap

On one hand into fratricidal fight,

Or, on the other, yield eternal right,

Frame lies of laws, and good and ill confound?

What fear we? Safe on freedom's vantage ground

Our feet are planted; let us there remain

In unrevengeful calm, no means untried

Which truth can sanction, no just claim denied,

The sad spectators of a suicide!

They break the lines of Union: shall we light

The fires of hell to weld anew the chain

On that red anvil where each blow is pain?

Draw we not even now a freer breath,

As from our shoulders falls a load of death

Loathsome as that the Tuscan's victim bore

When keen with life to a dead horror bound?

Why take we up the accursed thing again?

Pity, forgive, but urge them back no more

Who, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion's rag

With its vile reptile blazon. Let us press

The golden cluster on our brave old flag

In closer union, and, if numbering less,

Brighter shall shine the stars which still remain.

On January 16, 1861, when John Greenleaf Whittier wrote this poem, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had already seceded from the Union. Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas would follow suit by month's end. Far from suggesting that the Lincoln administration should go to war to "weld anew the chain" that bound them together, Whittier urged the government to let the Southern states depart if they so chose. It was the poet's opinion that the Union would be helped rather than hurt by separating itself from the evils associated with slavery and the states that practiced it.