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LEXINGTON DAY, 1905, by                    
First Line: On the hundred and thirtieth lexington day
Last Line: To our sons may he be their buckler and shield!
Subject(s): American Revolution; Battleships; Freedom; Heroism; Lexington, Battle Of (1775); Patriotism; Liberty; Heroes; Heroines; Concord, Battle Of


On the hundred and thirtieth Lexington day,
What can there remain for a daughter to say
Not already said for a score of times
In loftiest epic or lyrical rimes?
From the year seventy-five to the year eighty-three
We have sung every deed that helped make us free.
From the Puritan fathers who climbed Plymouth rocks
And the deified women who mended their socks,
To the squire's cocked hat and our grandmothers' stays,
We've told all we know of colonial days.

We've sung the wild ride of the young Paul Revere,
And the famous doings of Boston town;
For the Lexington dead we have dropped the tear;
We've clambered old Bunker Hill up and down;
In feathers and paint we have made our salt tea;
British Stamps have bestrewed the Atlantic shore;
Connecticut's charter we've hid in the tree,
Proclamations of freedom we've made by the score.
The Delaware crossing has not lacked its fame;
Valley Forge has become as a sacred name.
We've toasted the mothers who loaded the guns
And then wove the homespun for husbands and sons;
While of Betty's red petticoat cut into flags,
Even now every feminine one of us brags.
From Georgia to Maine of the battles we've gained,
To make modest mention, we've never refrained.
In short, Young Liberty's torches and caps
We've painted all over the country's new maps.

In the North and the South we have found our great men
And called them by name till the world should hear;
We've sorted them out with discriminate pen
From Washington down to the last volunteer,
Not forgetting the heroes from over the sea,
Whose banners bore eagles and French fleur de lis.

In our ancestors' homely life we have shared,
And their foibles, too, we never have spared;
Those Puritan whims we've delighted to tease,
Aye, the penalties dire for a Sunday kiss;
In a climate where everything else would freeze
They thought to forbid this tropical bliss.
With sly little thrusts we've made them our game,
Note that wooer by proxy,—Miles Standish by name.
The sins of our fathers, we've dragged to the light,
But with filial devotion we've made them our own;
We claim all their valor, but shirk not the sight
Of pillories, burnings, and casting a stone.
To their times we maintain that their errors were due,
That their virtues were many, their faults were but few;
Though we shrink from some facts of our country's rough youth,
We propose to accept the historical truth.

Thus the good and the bad, in loving refrain
We have sung to the world again and again,
So what is there left for us now to rehearse
But back to return by the way that we came,
And in rhythmical prose or prosaical verse
To vary our song though the theme be the same.

So from Yorktown back to the first of the days
In the year seventy-five on April nineteen,
When the people stood at the parting of ways,
And made their choice on the village green,
Each year let us tell, like the sacred beads
On a rosary great as the nation's name,
The string of all those glittering deeds
Well worthy to shine in a nation's fame.

Then here's to the day, the beginning of power,
When the choice was made which gave us the dower
Of our right to be free, by the eight lives sealed,
By the hearts' hot blood on Lexington field.
And here's to the six-score years and ten
Of a nation's life which have passed since then;
And here's to the future our children must brave,
A problem as great as their fathers e'er knew,—
This land, from prosperity's dangers to save;
A debt to their vast inheritance due.
So here's to our sires, our sons and our land,
And here's to the power, which today we wield!
May our fathers' God be the might of our hand,
To our sons may He be their buckler and shield!





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