BANNER AND PENNANT.
Yet louder, higher, stronger, bard! yet farther, wider cleave!
No longer let our children deem us riches and peace alone;
We can be terror and carnage also, and are so now.
Not now are we one of these spacious and haughty States, (nor any five, nor
ten;)
Nor market nor depot are we, nor money-bank in the city;
But these, and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines below,
are ours;
And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small;
And the fields they moisten are ours, and the crops, and the fruits are
ours;
Bays and channels, and ships sailing in and out, are ours—and we over all,
Over the area spread below, the three millions of square miles—the
capitals,
The thirty-five millions of people—O bard! in life and death supreme,
We, even we, from this day flaunt out masterful, high up above,
Not for the present alone, for a thousand years, chanting through you
This song to the soul of one poor little child.
CHILD.
O my father, I like not the houses;
They will never to me be anything—nor do I like money!
But to mount up there I would like, O father dear—that banner I like;
That pennant I would be, and must be.
FATHER.
Child of mine, you fill me with anguish,
To be that pennant would be too fearful;
Little you know what it is this day, and henceforth for ever;
It is to gain nothing, but risk and defy everything;
Forward to stand in front of wars—and O, such wars!—what have you to do
with them?
With passions of demons, slaughter, premature death?
POET.
Demons and death then I sing;
Put in all, aye all, will I—sword-shaped pennant for war, and banner so
broad and blue,
And a pleasure new and ecstatic, and the prattled yearning of children,
Blent with the sounds of the peaceful land, and the liquid wash of the sea;
And the icy cool of the far, far north, with rustling cedars and pines;
And the whirr of drums, and the sound of soldiers marching, and the hot sun
shining south;
And the beach-waves combing over the beach on my eastern shore, and my
western shore the same;
And all between those shores, and my ever-running Mississippi, with bends
and chutes;
And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of Missouri;
The CONTINENT—devoting the whole identity, without reserving an atom,
Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all, and the yield of
all.