Page:John Brown's body by Stephen Vincent Benét.djvu/14

 Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes

Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth

You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,

And you are ruined gardens in the South

And bleak New England farms, so winter-white

Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep

The middle grainland where the wind of night

Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.

A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag

With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.

They tried to fit you with an English song

And clip your speech into the English tale.

But, even from the first, the words went wrong,

The catbird pecked away the nightingale.

The homesick men begot high-cheekboned things

Whose wit was whittled with a different sound

And Thames and all the rivers of the kings

Ran into Mississippi and were drowned.

They planted England with a stubborn trust.

But the cleft dust was never English dust.

Stepchild of every exile from content

And all the disavouched, hard-bitten pack

Shipped overseas to steal a continent

With neither shirts nor honor to their back.

Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide,

Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square,

Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride,

Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,

The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vain

To make you God and France or God and Spain.