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(Excerpt)
ON Pokanoket’s height | |
| All life is hushed beneath the summer heat; | |
| No human step is heard from morn to night, | |
| And echo can repeat | |
| Naught but the lonely fish-hawk’s piercing screams, | 5 |
| As swooping downward to the placid bay, | |
| To touch the water’s breast he scarcely seems, | |
| Then slow flies homeward with his struggling prey, | |
| Where mate and clamorous young hang eager o’er | |
| Their nest upon the blasted sycamore. | 10 |
| Yon little grove of trees | |
| Waves soundless in the breeze | |
| That wanders down the slope; | |
| Hushed by the countless memories | |
| Which cluster round thy crest, renowned Mount Hope. | 15 |
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| How fair the scene! | |
| The city’s gleaming spires, the clustering towns, | |
| The modest villages, half hid in green, | |
| Soft hills and grassy downs, | |
| The dark-blue waves of Narragansett Bay, | 20 |
| Flecked with the snowflakes of an hundred sail, | |
| And, southward, in the distance, cold and gray, | |
| Newport lies sleeping in her foggy veil. | |
| Beyond the eastern waves, | |
| Where Taunton River laves | 25 |
| The harbor’s sandy edges, | |
| Queen of a thousand iron slaves, | |
| Fall River nestles in her granite ledges. * * * * * | |
| When here King Philip stood, | |
| Or rested in the niche we call his throne, | 30 |
| He looked o’er hill and vale and swelling flood, | |
| Which once were all his own. | |
| Before the white man’s footstep, day by day, | |
| As the sea-tides encroach upon the sand, | |
| He saw his proud possessions melt away, | 35 |
| And found himself a king, without a land. | |
| Constrained by unknown laws, | |
| Judged guilty without cause, | |
| Maddened by treachery, | |
| What wonder that his tortured spirit rose, | 40 |
| And turned upon his foes, | |
| And told his wrongs in words that still we see | |
| Recorded on the page of history. | |
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