COLUMBIA, Where Leadest Thou?
By C. M. Snow
God set a nation on a hill. He trimmed
The light He put within it; and He set
A guard to keep it day and night. Undimmed
It shone for one full century; and yet
That beacon burns no more. The guard is old
And broken with the weight of years. The greed
For conquest, subject people, and for gold
Has drowned the finer sense of noble deed
In those who follow him. He strives again
To keep his charge, and trim anew the light;
For ships drive on with freight of living men—
He fails, the breakers roar, and all is night. The storm is on; the beacon light is dead;
And round the lighthouse surge a careless host.
The ships before the gale are swiftly sped.
And fog shapes mock them like a taunting ghost.
"Where is the light?" the storm-tossed voyager cries.
"Where is that beacon lit by hand divine?"
A crimson glow lights up the leaden skies.
Columbia, blush! That beacon is not thine.
Thy guard is old; thy children have forgot
The glorious doctrines of thy liberty;
Forgot the boon for which their fathers fought,
And slumber long beneath the Upas tree. The fog-draped ships that speed toward thy shore
Shall stranded lie upon the wreckers’ beach;
Thy voice be hushed amid the breakers’ roar,
And foreign tongues thy children’s course impeach.
Land of the free, where is thy Bill of Rights?
Where is that compact framed without a flaw—
That sacred writ which every wrong indicts,
And makes amenable unto the law
The children of the prince as well as they
Who speed the plow and labor till the lights
Of heaven are trimmed to guide their homeward way?
O land we love, where is thy Bill of Rights? Methinks I hear one answer as of old
The guilty pair in Eden spake to Him
Whose sinless face they dared not then behold,
Tho evening shades had made their bower dim:
"Alas, we found us naked, and we hid!"
Forbidden fruit had stripped their glory robe
From off them; and they fled from Him who bid
Them keep the garden; and the groaning globe
Rolls onward with its crying weight of woe.
They found them naked, and a raiment made—
A human garb—of dying leaves. And so,
Proud land, thy children, too, have disobeyed. Enamored with the glint of gold, the sheen
Of royal trappings, and the pomp and show
Of serried ranks and military mien,
Which lured them on where fruits forbidden grow—
They tasted—ay, they ate the fruit; and then
The robe of glory which the nation wore
Was lifted like a fading cloud, and men
May hear the rustle of its folds no more.
Enrobed in freedom’s garb no more they stand,
But fashion to themselves in bold design
A garb of pageantry for freedom’s land,
Imperial purple in this home of thine. The nations once had looked and wavered. Thou,
Columbia, their ensample, couldst have led
Them then to nobler heights—but canst not now.
In every land I hear the measured tread,
The hoof-beats of the charger and the fife,
The blare of trumpets and the rumbling wheel
Of moving cannon. ’Tis the voice of strife,
The tongue of war, the argument of steel.
Thy soldiers battle on a foreign shore;
Thou givest gyves to men who would be free;
And in the forum of unreasoning war
Thou smitest those who had appealed to thee. Men longed, O Freedom, that thy budding flower
Might bloom for aye; but ere its petals ope’d,
A worm was gnawing in the bud; by power
Of good example men had fondly hoped
To see the world affirm thy fair control,
And everywhere beneath the vaulted sky
Mankind be free. Alas, the sacred scroll
Thy hand had penned is now proclaimed a lie!
Farewell, great Constitution of the free
And Declaration of the rights of men;
Thy thankless offspring would be rid of thee,
And turn to king and colony again.