Courage and Strength

To fight aloud, is very brave— But gallanter, I know Who charge within the bosom The Cavalry of Woe—

Behold the life at ease; it drifts, The sharpened life commands its course.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall.

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers, The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears Of pain, darkness, and cold.

Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth’s smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!

’Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do!

No, when the fight begins within himself, A man’s worth something.

You call for faith: I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, If faith o’ercomes doubt.

He ventured neck or nothing—heaven’s success Found, or earth’s failure.

To dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall, And baffled, get up and begin again.

“You’re wounded!” “Nay,” the soldier’s pride Touched to the quick, he said: “I’m killed, Sire!” And his chief beside, Smiling the boy fell dead.

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A Lady with a Lamp [Florence Nightingale] shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

For to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty.

Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Not so Leonidas and Washington, Whose every battlefield is holy ground, Which breathes of nations saved, not worlds undone.

Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylae.