But village stir and village matters keep
Free Masonry too subtle and too deep
For strangers’ smattering tongue and half-taught eye
That sees them through a garbled mystery.
What shall be known of souls that live and love,
Marry and bear, know joy and agony,
Under blue circle of an Island sky
Within the silver ring of sounding sea?
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Their quiet dreams take root in resolute ways,
Their poetry is blown to spurts of flame;
From their grim grandeur of forgotten days
Comes many a high and sober-minded name.
Their character persists where many a door
Opened its narrow pride to let them roam,
Their feet stand firm on an unshaken floor,
Roofed by great roof-trees of New England home.
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So to the memory their great names come
What time they reckoned life and grasped its fact,
Their splendid hours when their spirits’ dumb,
Unworded promise became conscious act;
The Islanders, Nantucketers, their theme
Endures in a worth that cannot fail,
Across the country their progressive dream
Steadily marks the Great New England Trail.
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For even now in times of want and war,
In times of apathy and greed and fear,
The challenges to spirit skyward soar,
The core of stalwart things is hidden here;
The white shoals lift like new creative shore,
The Sound’s salt breath comes like a stirrup cup,
Till every wanderer takes his burden up.
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So, with it all remote, tranquil, unchanged,
Untouched in depths of solitude and peace,
The Island fades away, the shoals are ranged,
Backward in sliding rank the bluffs decrease;
Backward they slide, the glittering Sound spreads wide.
Now is no road to Island paths but foam,
A long, long water-path twixt us and home.
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