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(From Under the Old Elm)
VIRGINIA gave us this imperial man | |
| Cast in the massive mould | |
| Of those high-statured ages old | |
| Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran; | |
| She gave us this unblemished gentleman: | 5 |
| What shall we give her back but love and praise | |
| As in the dear old unestranged days | |
| Before the inevitable wrong began? | |
| Mother of States and undiminished men, | |
| Thou gavest us a country, giving him, | 10 |
| And we owe alway what we owed thee then: | |
| The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us again | |
| Shines as before with no abatement dim. | |
| A great man’s memory is the only thing | |
| With influence to outlast the present whim | 15 |
| And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring. | |
| All of him that was subject to the hours | |
| Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours: | |
| Across more recent graves, | |
| Where unresentful Nature waves | 20 |
| Her pennons o’er the shot-ploughed sod, | |
| Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God, | |
| We from this consecrated plain stretch out | |
| Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt | |
| As here the united North | 25 |
| Poured her embrownëd manhood forth | |
| In welcome of our savior and thy son. | |
| Through battle we have better learned thy worth, | |
| The long-breathed valor and undaunted will, | |
| Which, like his own, the day’s disaster done, | 30 |
| Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still. | |
| Both thine and ours the victory hardly won; | |
| If ever with distempered voice or pen | |
| We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back, | |
| And for the dead of both don common black. | 35 |
| Be to us evermore as thou wast then, | |
| As we forget thou hast not always been, | |
| Mother of States and unpolluted men, | |
| Virginia, fitly named from England’s manly queen! | |
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