| |
| SPERANZA, Speranza! we felt through the night-time | |
| The thrill of thy voice and the joy of thy lyre; | |
| Heard thee far off singing sweet of the bright time | |
| Prophets foretold in their large heart’s desire. | |
| |
| Strains floated by in the sad waning moonlight, | 5 |
| While we stood calling thy name from afar. | |
| Come to thy summer bowers, queen of high noonlight, | |
| Full-armed and splendid,—our souls’ morning-star! | |
| |
| Come as thou camest when Italy panted | |
| And leapt to her feet, o’er her dukes and her kings. | 10 |
| Come, like the new life America planted | |
| To blossom and yield through her ages of springs. | |
| |
| Come to the spirits benighted, unlettered, | |
| Unbarring the portals of science and love. | |
| Come to the bodies enslaved, tasked, and fettered; | 15 |
| Build up the freedom no tyrant can move. | |
| |
| O, they are grappling for life,—just for breathing; | |
| Hoping naught, asking naught,—only to stand; | |
| Only to stand with their arms interwreathing, | |
| Brotherlike, bound to their own fatherland. | 20 |
| |
| Faintly they hear thee. “Speranza, Speranza!” | |
| They call in the gloom. Are the echoes all dead? | |
| Comes there no voice from Mount Ida in answer? | |
| Shines there no star in the pale morning-red? | |
| |
| Must the fierce ranks of the Ottoman Nero | 25 |
| Trample their life out with barbarous feet? | |
| Is there no god, no Olympian hero, | |
| Left on thy mountains, O desolate Crete? | |
| |
| O, shame on the nations who sent the Crusaders | |
| To wrest from the Turk the dead stones of a tomb, | 30 |
| Yet give a live race to the savage invaders, | |
| And lift not a finger to lighten its gloom! | |
| |
| And shame to proud France, who has opened with greeting | |
| To the red-handed tyrant her welcoming doors; | |
| And shame to old England, that welcome repeating, | 35 |
| That brings the crowned butcher a guest to her shores! | |
| |
| Ah, well! Heaven wills that the selfish should blunder. | |
| The tyrants are deaf, but the people know well | |
| How God in the heavens sits holding the thunder, | |
| That strikes to its centre the kingdom of hell. | 40 |
| |
| For sooner or later—no seer can foreknow it— | |
| Falls the swift bolt, and the thrones are ablaze. | |
| Time yet shall re-echo the lay of the poet, | |
| And Greece shall live over her happiest days. | |
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