Explore "Jacob Goodpasture" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When Fort Sumter fell and the war came / I cried out in bitterness of soul:
"O glorious republic now no more!"
When they buried my soldier son / To the call of trumpets and the sound of drums / My heart broke beneath the weight / Of eighty years, and I cried:
"Oh, son who died in a cause unjust!
In the strife of Freedom slain!"
And I crept here under the grass.
And now from the battlements of time, behold:
Thrice thirty million souls being bound together / In the love of larger truth, / Rapt in the expectation of the birth / Of a new Beauty, / Sprung from Brotherhood and Wisdom.
I with eyes of spirit see the Transfiguration / Before you see it.
But ye infinite brood of golden eagles nesting ever higher, / Wheeling ever higher, the sunlight wooing / Of lofty places of Thought, / Forgive the blindness of the departed owl.