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William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Massachusetts Poets. 1922.

Essex


THY hills are kneeling in the tardy spring,

And wait, in supplication’s gentleness,

The certain resurrection that shall bring

A robe of verdure for their nakedness.

Thy perfumed valleys where the twilights dwell,

Thy fields within the sunlight’s living coil

Now promise, while the veins of nature swell,

Eternal recompense to human toil.

And when the sunset’s final shades depart

The aspiration to completed birth

Is sweet and silent; as the soft tears start,

We know how wanton and how little worth

Are all the passions of our bleeding heart

That vex the awful patience of the earth.

II

Thine are the large winds and the splendid sun

Glutting the spread of heaven to the floor

Of waters rhythmic from far shore to shore,

And thine the stars, revealing one by one,

Thine the grave, lucent night’s oblivion,

The tawny moon that waits below the skies,—

Strange as the dawn that smote their blistered eyes

Who watched from Calvary when the Deed was done.

And thine the good brown earth that bares its breast

To thy benign October, thine the trees

Lusty with fruitage in the late year’s rest;

And thine the men whose blood has glorified

Thy name with Liberty Is divine decrees—

The men who loved thy soil and fought and died.

III

Toward thine Eastern window when the morn

Steals through the silver mesh of silent stars,

I come unlaurelled from the strenuous wars

Where men have fought and wept and died Forlorn.

But here, across the early fields of corn,

The living silence dwelleth, and the gray

Sweet earth-mist, while afar the lisp of spray

Breathes from the ocean like a Triton’s horn.

Open thy lattice, for the gage is won

For which this earth has journeyed though the dust

Of shattered systems, cold about the sun;

And proved by sin, by mighty lives impearled,

A voice cries through the sunrise: “Time is just!”—

And falls like dew God’s pity on the world