Poems (Proctor)/The Washington Monument

by Edna Dean Proctor

THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT.

Have you seen by Potomac that shaft in the skies,
From the meadows exulting to mate with the sun?—
Now misty and gray as the clouds it defies,
Now bright in the splendor its daring has won!
The winds are its comrades, the lightnings, the storm;
The first flush of dawn on its summit shines fair;
And the last ray of evening illumines its form
Towering grand and alone in the limitless air.

By Nile rise the Pyramids, wrapped in the shade
Of ages that passed as the waves on the shore;
And Karnak, majestic, whose vast colonnades
A god might have fashioned for man to adore;
And Baalbec uplifts like a vision divine
Its wonder of beauty by Lebanon's wall;—
But captive and slave reared in sorrow the shrine,
The palace, the temple, the pyramid tall.

To Freedom Potomac's proud obelisk towers,
And Karnak and Baalbec in beauty outvies,
For Washington's glory its grandeur empowers,
And freemen with joy piled its stones to the skies!
O Symbol of Liberty, matchless, sublime,
Still soar from the meadows to mate with the sun,
And see thy Republic, to uttermost time,
The noble, the peerless, the Many in One!