Barnard College - Mortarboard Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 11 text:

And yet at moments when the mind was hot With something fierier than joy or grief, When each known spot was an eternal spot And every leaf was an immortal leaf, I think I have seen you, not as one, But clad in diverse semblances and powers, Always the same, as light falls from the sun, And always different, as the differing hours. Yet through each altered garment that you wore, The naked body, shaking the heart ' s core. And I have seen and heard you in the dry Close-huddled furnace of the city street When the parched moort was planted in the sky And the limp air hung dead against the heat. I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant, Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound, Enormous metal, shaking to the chant Of a triphammer striking iron ground. Enormous power, ugly to the fool, And beautiful as a well-handled tool. This flesh was seeded from no foreign grain But Pennsylvnia and Kentucky wheat, And it has soaked in California rain And five years tempered in New England sleet To strive at last, against an alien proof And by the changes of an alien moon, To build again that blue, American roof Over a half-forgotten battle-tune And call unsurely, from a haunted ground, Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound. Receive the dream too haughty for the breast, Receive the words that should have walked as bold As the storm walks along the mountain-crest And are like beggars whining in the cold. The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill, The patchwork colors, fading from the first, And all the fire that fretted at the will With such a barren ecstasy of thirst. Receive them all — and should you choose to touch them With one slant ray of quick, American light, Even the dust will have no power to smutch them, Even the worst will glitter in the night. If not — the dry bones littered by the way May still point giants toward their golden prey. — Stephen Vincent Benet