Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/Yale
YALE. JUNE, 1920.
Though we are naught, who come back to her arms,
Though we are weak and coarsened by the years,
Grown fretful of our gains, and the alarms
Of life that mar the ease that time endears;
Though we be naught, though we be selfish men,
Contemptuous of that which made Yale great,
Though we have long since shed the dream that then
Led in its living splendour far and straight;
Though we have mocked the men that gave us Yale,
Though we have wasted our inheritance,
Yet she forgives, and still within her pale
Accepting us, recalls us to romance.
O greater than thy greatest sons, O Yale,
O silent watcher by the silent tower,
Breathe on thy children, feverish and frail,
Something of thy still majesty and power.
O greater than thy fathers of the past,
O greater than these sons that round thee stand,
Grant now to these thy youngest sons at last
Traits of the great to-morrow of our land.
O greater than the Present or the Past,
Child of the great America to be,
Speak through our lives in actions that outlast
The noisy years, in gestured prophecy.
So shall the centuries invade the years,
So shall the great Dead and Unborn be brought
To life to summon from the quick, their peers,
And weight our age with import past all thought.