Flag of the Free, still float on high
Through every age to come;
Bright beacon of the azure sky,
True light of Freedom’s dome.
Till nations all shall cease to grope
In vain for liberty,
Oh, shine, last lingering star of hope
Of all humanity!
Is there, in all our American poetry, a more eloquent apostrophe to our flag than that, not excepting even Joseph Rodman Drake’s? Perhaps the allusion to Attucks in the first stanza will require a note for the white reader. Every colored school-child, however, knows that Crispus Attucks was a brave and stalwart Negro, who, in the van of the patriots of Boston that resisted the British soldiers in the so-called “Boston Massacre,” March 5, 1770, fell with two British bullets in his breast, among the first martyrs for independence:
Thus Attucks brave, without a moment’s pause,
Full bared his breast in Freedom’s holy cause,
First fell and tore the code of Tyranny’s cruel laws—
so writes of him this same poet in his Ode to Ethiopia.
II. Raymond Garfield Dandridge
Twelve years ago a young house-decorator in Cincinnati was stricken down with partial paralysis, since which time he has been bedfast and all but helpless. On this bed of distress he learned what resources were within himself, powers that in health he knew not of. The fountain of poetry sprang up in what threatened to be a desert life.—The artist-nature within manifested itself in a new realm, the realm of words set to tuneful measures. This artisan, turned by affliction into a poet, is Raymond Garfield Dandridge. Again, ad astra per aspera.
Raymond G. Dandridge
It is not great poetry that Dandridge is giving to the world, but it is poetry. His musings shaped into rhyme reach the heart. They have sweetness and light—“the two most precious things in the world.” All the art he has acquired, untaught, from his reading and unaided thinking. Naturally one would not expect that art to be flawless. His initial poem, while not literally a self-description, will serve to introduce this adopted son of the lyric Muse: