Was America, then, this thoroughly "English-speaking peoples" in the origins of its ideas? Well, it seemed to me to be so, when I wrote this; and I'm not sure I've changed that much since.
A thousand years and more of British men,
Not knowing what it was, created it
From dreams half-voiced yet still worth life to those
Who dreamt them, gathered in the deeds and words
Of a hundred shores and ages of the world:
Thermopylae; and, "Let my people go!";
"I'm Spartacus!"; the Danegeld, paid in blood --
The cries and acts that made revolt against
A foreign god, an over-crown, a state
That stopped a man from living as he ought --
A thousand years and more they cherished it,
Until a half-millennium had gone by
Fought standing for it, lived the life it meant
As best in brawling feudal world they might;
And still they, lusty, joyful best of all
Its husbandmen in history, knew not
Its final quintessential core
That waited.
Since Norman steel completed the alloy
Of tough, cold iron from Dane and Saxon with
The stubborn unrefined brute British ore,
And England, half a while secure, turned out,
And caught the imperial sickness she had fought.
To colonize she sent her misfit men;
Some criminal, but with them went the strange
Assorted crew, the thinking fringe of those
Who guarded it, the sacred British thing.
The stout and yoeman core remained, but to
A revolutionary spark snapped back
The new world went the voices, those who had
To have some room to swing an axe inside
Their souls. And here they concentrated, all
The distillate of the distillers of
The dreams. America became
A concept.
And forth from colony to colony
And o'er the sea from English friends who now
Had taken up the British thing at home.
And now at last the living words were found
That said it, spoke the heart of that for which
The millions of the hundred shores and times
Had lived and died and fought and dreamed, the thing
That evolution gave to man for him
To realize and make him truly man.
And so they earned and took it for their own;
Americans, with fighting minds and hands,
They turned to face the Isles from which it came
And told them what it is, and wrote it down,
And lifted from the paper with the pen
The glorious, awful heritage
Of freedom.
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© 2007 Anthony Buckland,
anthonybuckland@telus.net
last modified: May 12, 2007
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