AMERICA: GREETING

I have journeyed the spacious world over,

And here to thy sapphire wide gate,

America, I, thy True Lover

Return now, exalted, elate,

As an heir who returns to recover

His forefathers’ lofty estate.

I‘ ve seen visions of castle and palace

Up-soaring to sun-flooded skies,

Where men have drunk deep of Death's chalice,

In infinite soul-agonies —

Where Tyranny glutted her malice

And battened on Liberty's cries.

Where splendor of palace and tower

Cried up unto God with men's blood;

Where th’ emblems of Tyranny's Power

Imperial and brazen have stood,

With faggot and sword to devour,

And the rack scowling hard by God's Rood.

And now at thy fair, open portal,

I stand as I stood in my Youth,

Amazed at the vision immortal

Of naked and unashamed Truth:

The Truth that the Fathers have taught all

Their children: their birth-right in sooth.

I greet thee: thy purple, large reaches,—

From the snow-mantled, spire-pointed pine,

To thy golden, long, low-lying beaches,

Awash with thy tropical brine,

And thine infinite bosom that teaches

How God hath made Freedom divine.

God dowered thee fair mid the Oceans:

He bulwarked thee strong with the seas,

That Man might preserve here the motions

He gave Freedom's bold processes:

That Man in his loftiest devotions

Might serve Freedom's altars in Peace.

How crude then and rude then soever

Thy struggles to lift from the sod,

Thy Freedom is strong to dissever

The Shackles, the Yoke, and the Rod;

Thy Freedom is Mighty forever,

For men who kneel only to God.