WINGED VICTORY
Icarus, Daedalus, Medea's dragons,
Pegasus, Leonardo, Swedenborg,
Cyrano de Bergerac, with dew-filled flagons,
Bacon, who schemed with chemicals and forge,
Lana, of copper spheres of air exhausted,
Therefore made light to rise
Up where the pathless ways are frosted
In the blue vitriol of the skies.
Montgolfier, Franklin, von Zeppelin, Watt,
Edison, an engine must be, spiral springs,
Nor steam move not these more than condor wings
Of heaven's Argonaut,
Gathering the sun-set clouds for golden fleece.
Santos Dumont and Langley, over these
The Americans, the brothers Wright.
America finds wings for flight.
At last out of the New World wings are born
To wheel far up where cold is, and a light
Dazzling and immaculate,
In the heights where stands the temple of the Morn.
Winged Victory more beautiful than Samothrace's
For the New World opening the gate
Of heaven at last, where mortals enter in
Unconquerably and win
The great escape from earth, the measureless spaces
Of air across the inimical abyss
Between ethereal precipice and precipice.
Hail! spirits of the race's
Courage to be free, adventurers
Of infinite desire!
Hail! seed of the ancient wars,
Of burning glasses, catapults, Greek fire!
Hail! final conquerors,
Out of whose vision greater vision springs—
America with wings!
The vulture lags behind, the Gorgones,
Revealed or ambushed in the thunder clouds,
Would tear from heaven these audacities
Of deathless spirit, shatter them and spill
The blasphemy of genius from the sky.
Gods are you, flyers, whom no danger shrouds,
No terror shakes the will.
Gods are you though you suffer and must die,
Men winged as gods who fly!
Borelli, in the centuries that are gone,
With feathers made him wings, but steel
Soars for the petrol demon's toil,
Fed by the sap of trees far under earth
In the long eons past turned into oil.
The petrol demon in the enchanted coil
Of lightning howls and spins the invisible wheel
Which had its birth
In the rapt vision of Archimides.
Borelli, in the centuries that are gone,
With feathers made him wings. But now a swan,
A steel-borne beetle cleaves the immensities,
Fed with fire of amber and oil of trees,
And soars against the sun,
And over mountains, seas!
Flight more auspicious than the flight of cranes
In Homer's Troyland, or than eagles flying
Toward Imaus when the midnight wanes.
Victorious flight! symbol of man defying
Low dungeons of the spirit, darkness, chains.
Flight beyond superstition and the reigns
Of tyrannies where thought of man should be
Swift as his thought is free.
Flight of an era born to-day
That puts the past and all its dead away.
Locusts of the new Jehovah sent to scourge
All Pharaohs who enslave.
Hornets with multiple eyes,
Scorning surprise,
And armed to purge
The despot and the knave
Out of the fairer land where men shall live,
Winning all things which were so fugitive
Of wisdom, happiness and peace,
Of hope, of spiritual release
From fear of life, life's mean significance,
Till life be ordered, not a thing of chance.
The hopelessness of him who cried
Vanity of Vanities
Was justified,
But now no longer must abide.
Failure was his, and failure filled the hours
Of our fathers in the past—let it depart.
Triumph is come, and triumph must be ours.
The archangels of earth through Israel,
Through India and Greece
Shall find us wings for life and for increase
Of living, and shall battle down the hell
Whose fires still smolder and profane.
Life and the human heart
In living must become the aeroplane,
Not the yoked oxen and the cart.
Let but the thought of East and West be blent,
Europe, America, the Orient,
To give life wings as Time's last great event:
The final glory of wings to the soul of man
In an order of life human, but divine,
Fashioned in carefulest thought, powerful but of delicate design,
As the wings of the aeroplane are.
Where spirit of man is used to the full, but saved,
As the petrol demon, in this dragon of war,
Uses and saves his power.
Where neither thought, truth, love nor gifts, nor any flower
Of spirit of man, so mangled or enslaved
In the eras gone, is wasted or depraved.
Man shall no longer crawl, the curse is raised
With winning of his wings.
Dust he no more shall eat,
Who crawls not, but from feet
Has risen to wings!
Man shall no longer python be.
These wings are prophecies of a world made free!
Man shall no longer crawl, the curse is raised.
He has soared to the gate of heaven and gazed
Into the meadows of infinity,
Winged and with lightning shod,
Beyond the old day's lowering cloud and murk.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
Man shows His handiwork!