Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration

I.
Weak-winged is song, Nor aims at that clear-ethered height Whither the brave deed climbs for light:
 * We seem to do them wrong,

Bringing our robin's-leaf to deck their hearse Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse, Our trivial song to honor those who come With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire:
 * Yet sometimes feathered words are strong,

A gracious memory to buoy up and save From Lethe's dreamless ooze, the common grave
 * Of the unadventurous throng.

II.
To-day our Reverent Mother welcomes back
 * Her wisest Scholars, those who understood

The deeper teaching of her mystic tome,
 * And offered their fresh lives to make it good:
 * No lore of Greece or Rome,

No science peddling with the names of things, Or reading stars to find inglorious fates,
 * Can lift our life with wings

Far from Death's idle gulf that for the many waits,
 * And lengthen out our dates

With that clear fame whose memory sings In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates: Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all!
 * Not such the trumpet-call
 * Of thy diviner mood,
 * That could thy sons entice

From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest Of those half-virtues which the world calls best,
 * Into War's tumult rude;
 * But rather far that stern device

The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood
 * In the dim, unventured wood,
 * The that lurks beneath
 * The letter's unprolific sheath,
 * Life of whate'er makes life worth living,

Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food,
 * One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving.

III.
Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil
 * Amid the dust of books to find her,

Content at last, for guerdon of their toil,
 * With the cast mantle she hath left behind her.
 * Many in sad faith sought for her,
 * Many with crossed hands sighed for her;
 * But these, our brothers, fought for her
 * At life's dear peril wrought for her,
 * So loved her that they died for her,
 * Tasting the raptured fleetness
 * Of her divine completeness:
 * Their higher instinct knew

Those love her best who to themselves are true, And what they dare to dream of, dare to do;
 * They followed her and found her
 * Where all may hope to find,

Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.
 * Where faith made whole with deed
 * Breathes its awakening breath
 * Into the lifeless creed,
 * They saw her plumed and mailed,
 * With sweet, stern face unveiled,

And all-repaying eyes look proud on them in death.

IV.
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
 * Into the silent hollow of the past;
 * What is there that abides
 * To make the next age better for the last?
 * Is earth too poor to give us
 * Something to live for here that shall outlive us?
 * Some more substantial boon

Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?
 * The little that we see
 * From doubt is never free;
 * The little that we do
 * Is but half-nobly true;
 * With our laborious living

What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
 * Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,
 * Only secure in every one's conniving,

A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
 * After our little hour of strut and rave,

With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
 * Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave,
 * But stay! no age was e'er degenerate,
 * Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
 * For in our likeness still we shape our fate,
 * Ah, there is something here
 * Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer,
 * Something that gives our feeble light
 * A high immunity from Night,
 * Something that leaps life's narrow bars

To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;
 * A seed of sunshine that doth leaven
 * Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars,
 * And glorify our clay
 * With light from fountains elder than the Day;
 * A conscience more divine than we,
 * A gladness fed with secret tears,
 * A vexing, forward-reaching sense
 * Of some more noble permanance;
 * A light across the sea,
 * Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,

Still glimmering from the heights of undegenerate years.

V.

 * Whither leads the path
 * To ampler fates that leads?
 * Not down flowery meads,
 * To reap an aftermath
 * Of youth's vainglorious weeds,
 * But up the steep, amid the wrath
 * And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,
 * Where the world's best hope and stay

By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds.
 * Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,
 * Ere yet the sharp, decisive word

Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword
 * Dreams in its peaceful sheath;

But some day the live coal behind the thought,
 * Whether from Baäl's stone obscene,
 * Or from the shrine serene
 * Of God's pure altar brought,

Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men: Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And cries reproachful: "Was it, then, my praise, And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth; Give me thy life or cower in empty phrase, The victim of thy genius, not its mate!"
 * Life may be given in many ways,
 * And loyalty to Truth be sealed

As bravely in the closet as the field
 * So bountiful is Fate;
 * But then to stand beside her,
 * When craven churls deride her,

To front a life in arms and not to yield,
 * This shows, methinks, God's plan
 * And measure of a stalwart man,
 * Limbed like the old heroic breeds,
 * Who stands self-posed on manhood's solid earth,
 * Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,

Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

XII.
Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!
 * Thy God, in these distempered days,
 * Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways,

And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace!
 * Bow down in prayer and praise!

No poorest in thy borders but may now Life to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow, O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more! Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,
 * And letting thy set lips,
 * Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,

The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, Among the Nations bright beyond compare!
 * What were our lives without thee?
 * What all our lives to save thee?
 * We reck not what we gave thee;
 * We will not dare to doubt thee,

But ask whatever else, and we will dare!