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(1776)
I
BEFORE
’TWAS not while England’s sword unsheathed | |
| Put half a world to flight, | |
| Nor while their new-built cities breathed | |
| Secure behind her might; | |
| Not while she poured from Pole to Line | 5 |
| Treasure and ships and men— | |
| These worshippers at Freedom’s shrine | |
| They did not quit her then! | |
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| Not till their foes were driven forth | |
| By England o’er the main— | 10 |
| Not till the Frenchman from the North | |
| Had gone with shattered Spain; | |
| Not till the clean-swept oceans showed | |
| No hostile flag unrolled, | |
| Did they remember what they owed | 15 |
| To Freedom—and were bold! | |
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II
AFTER
THE SNOW lies thick on Valley Forge, | |
| The ice on the Delaware, | |
| But the poor dead soldiers of King George | |
| They neither know nor care— | 20 |
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| Not though the earliest primrose break | |
| On the sunny side of the lane, | |
| And scuffling rookeries awake | |
| Their England’s spring again. | |
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| They will not stir when the drifts are gone | 25 |
| Or the ice melts out of the bay: | |
| And the men that served with Washington | |
| Lie all as still as they. | |
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| They will not stir though the mayflower blows | |
| In the moist dark woods of pine, | 30 |
| And every rock-strewn pasture shows | |
| Mullein and columbine. | |
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| Each for his land, in a fair fight, | |
| Encountered, strove, and died, | |
| And the kindly earth that knows no spite | 35 |
| Covers them side by side. | |
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| She is too busy to think of war; | |
| She has all the world to make gay; | |
| And, behold, the yearly flowers are, | |
| Where they were in our fathers’ day! | 40 |
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| Golden-rod by the pasture-wall | |
| When the columbine is dead, | |
| And sumach leaves that turn, in fall, | |
| Bright as the blood they shed. | |
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