Explore "Captain Orlando Killion" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Oh, you young radicals and dreamers, / You dauntless fledglings / Who pass by my headstone, / Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army / And my faith in God!
They are not denials of each other.
Go by reverently, and read with sober care / How a great people, riding with defiant shouts / The centaur of Revolution, / Spurred and whipped to frenzy, / Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea / Over the precipice they were nearing, / And fell from his back in precipitate awe / To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.
Moved by the same sense of vast reality / Of life and death, and burdened as they were / With the fate of a race, / How was I, a little blasphemer, / Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood, / To remain a blasphemer, / And a captain in the army?