LONG, too long, O land,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful, you learn’d from joys and prosperity only;
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish—advancing, grappling with direst
fate,
and
recoiling not;
And now to conceive, and show to the world, what your children en-masse really are;
(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?)
5
Really a poem about the sacrifice a nation needs to make and the courage needed to be recognized as a nation which deserves what it has. America went a long time before sufferring the terrible hardships of a war. Per haps too long.