John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.
Anti-Slavery PoemsThe New Year
T
The echo fading from the chime;
Again the shadow moveth o’er
The dial-plate of time!
With weary feet on sea and shore,
Impatient for the last dread vow
That time shall be no more!
The semblance of a smile has passed:
The year departing leaves more nigh
Time’s fearfullest and last.
The sum of all since time began;
The birth and death, the joy and pain,
Of Nature and of Man.
And streams released from Winter’s chain,
And bursting bud, and opening flower,
And greenly growing grain;
And rainbows o’er her hill-tops bowed,
And voices in her rising storm;
God speaking from His cloud!
And soft, warm days of golden light,
The glory of her forest leaves,
And harvest-moon at night;
And prisoned stream, and drifting snow,
The brilliance of her heaven above
And of her earth below:
With earth’s low instincts finds abode,
The highest of the links which bind
Brute nature to her God;
His childhood’s merriest laughter rung,
And active sports to manlier might
The nerves of boyhood strung!
Have soothed or burned in manhood’s breast,
And lofty aims and low desires
By turns disturbed his rest.
Has mingled with the funeral knell;
And o’er the dying’s ear has gone
The merry marriage-bell.
While Want, in many a humble shed,
Toiled, shivering by her cheerless hearth,
The live-long night for bread.
The sport of lust, and pride, and scorn!
Plucked off the crown his Maker gave,
His regal manhood gone!
Blackened with slavery’s blight and ban,
That human chattel drags his chains,
An uncreated man!
My country, is thy flag unrolled,
With scorn, the gazing stranger sees
A stain on every fold.
It gathers scorn from every eye,
And despots smile and good men frown
Whene’er it passes by.
Above the slaver’s loathsome jail;
Its folds are ruffling even now
His crimson flag of sale.
The trade in human flesh is driven,
And at each careless hammer-fall
A human heart is riven.
Vested with power to shield the right,
And throw each vile and robber den
Wide open to the light.
Men of the North, subdued and still;
Meek, pliant poltroons, only fit
To work a master’s will.
A passive herd of Northern mules,
Just braying through their purchased throats
Whate’er their owner rules.
The vilest of the vile, whose name,
Embalmed in infinite disgrace,
Is deathless in its shame!
Against the people clamoring there,
An ass, to trample on their floor
A people’s right of prayer!
Self-pilloried to the public view,
A mark for every passing blast
Of scorn to whistle through;
Of Southrons o’er their pliant tool,—
A new Stylites on his post,
“Sacred to ridicule!”
To Freedom’s holy purpose given,
Now rears its black and ruined wall,
Beneath the wintry heaven,
The fiendish mob, the prostrate law,
The fiery jet through midnight’s gloom,
Our gazing thousands saw.
Torn from him: and the sons of those
Whose blood in Freedom’s sternest fight
Sprinkled the Jersey snows,
That Slavery’s guilty fears might cease,
And those whom God created men
Toil on as brutes in peace.
A bow of promise bends on high,
And gleams of sunshine, soft and warm,
Break through our clouded sky.
Of freemen rising for the right:
Each valley hath its rallying word,
Each hill its signal light.
The strengthening light of freedom shines,
Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay,
And Vermont’s snow-hung pines!
To Alleghany’s laurelled crest,
O’er lakes and prairies, streams and glades,
It shines upon the West.
In Slavery’s land of woe and sin,
And through the blackness of that hell,
Let Heaven’s own light break in.
Before that light poured full and strong,
So shall the Southern heart awake
To all the bondman’s wrong.
The song of grateful millions rise,
Like that of Israel’s ransomed band
Beneath Arabia’s skies:
Our banner’s shade, our eagle’s wing,
From Slavery’s night of moral death
To light and life shall spring.
The master’s guilt, and hate, and fear,
And unto both alike shall dawn
A New and Happy Year.