Classic Poem

If Sculpture fain would typify our land
In dark memorial bronze, it puts on high
A woman's form, with awe-compelling eye;
With straight, full brow beneficent and bland,
And waving locks restrained by a circling band;
With parted lips to welcome or defy;
With bosom where the Christ-child's head should lie;
A half-sheathed sword grasped in her shapely hand.

Around each graciously-proportioned limb
Curve bracelet and anklet like an Amazon's;
A shield with pointed boss and figured rim
Rests by her knee; her daughters and her sons
Cluster about her, clean and muscular-slim,
Living as Life may live in plastic bronze.

Symbolic of her conquests and her powers,
The slaughtered bison and bear lie at her feet;
A captive Indian, strong and antelope-fleet,
With eagle-crest and in his war-gear cowers;

Fierce hatred 'neath his brow contracted glowers.
Symbol of wealth and plenty, joy replete,
Behold the sheaves of barley, corn and wheat;
Symbol of beauty, lo! the wreath of flowers.

Justice, with blinded eyes and even scales;
Truth, with calm face and keen Ithurial spear;
Religion, with the censer, cross and nails,
And Freedom, with open book and broken gyves,
At the four angles in grave garb appear
As angels of the stars that rule our lives.

Yet how inadequate are all the arts
This vast and varied empire to convey
To eye or ear or mind in plastic play
Of lights and shades and shapes and blended parts
Harmonious, majestic! Can guns and darts,
Though signs, an army's mighty force portray,
A candle teach the beauty of the day,
Song more than hint the marriage of two hearts?

How then can Poesy, though fired with fervor,
Intoxicate with dreams, with eagle vision,
With rapt imagination quick to serve her,
Wise to select the word with sure decision
Winged with the plumes of Genius, dare attempt
A task which only Madness might have dreamt?

Should I who rank of poet would not claim,
Because it is so lofty, so divine,
That those whom Time calls worthy of it shine.
Down through the ages evermore the same,
Without a diminution of the flame —
The great stars in the firmament benign —
Should I whose light is nebulous and pine
At such a task impossible dare aim?

Could even the greatest make a small beginning
Of such portrayal it were all in vain;
The web is far too vast for human spinning,
The plan too infinite for Art to attain.
What prize then can I win that is worth the winning?
Will joy of trial pay for failure's pain?

The columned prose of figures and statistics
Piled up to show our country's huge resources;
Lakes, rivers, mountains converted into forces;
The crops in all their divers characteristics
In bushels (facts detestable to mystics!);
Output of mines, census of kine and horses,
Balance of trade in all its myriad courses —
Can these outrival Art or Apollo's distychs?

Scholars in schools and studios and colleges,
Workmen in factories toiling, proletarians,
The adepts in a score of learned " ologies, "
Our soldiers, sailors, engineers, agrarians —
Do they thus marshalled better represent
What in the world COLUMBIA is meant?

'T would need a book large as the universe
To picture adequately all the life,
The comedy, the tragedy, the strife,
The passion, the enormous labor; to rehearse
The daily history; to show in terse
Dramatic narrative three centuries rife
With infinite growth, Life personal, World-Life.
What marvellous choice for poet's triumph-verse!

Only a segment of the circle grand,
Only one billow from the boundless Main,
From off the beach only one grain of sand;
Yet in that segment, billow, crystal grain,
Somewhat of the beauty one can understand,
And so the labor is not wholly vain!