Poems (Ford)/The Exile's Dream
THE EXILE'S DREAM.
My heart forever fondly turns to thee, my native land,And oft again in happy dreams upon thy shore I stand;I sit beneath the hawthorn boughs, upon the daisied sod,Or roam the old, familiar paths my childish footsteps trod.
I see the hoary towers that rise to tell thee of thy youth,The lakes that rest upon thy breast, clear as the light of truth;The splendid wrecks of lordly halls, that tell of glory gone,Thy holy graves, where heroes sleep, while slaves must still live on.
Thy beauty, oh, my native land, can never pass away:Fair as thou wert when great and free, thou art in chains to-day! But 'tis a beauty, oh! so sad! it makes the tears to start—Sad as the smile that wreathes the lips when Death has chilled the heart.
But once, my native land, I dreamed a glorious dream of thee,That thou once more wert throned a Queen upon the subject sea;In stern defiance proudly rose thy towers and castles tall,While, fanned by Freedom, floated out the Green Flag over all.
The thunder-shout of victory that rose from hill and glen,Might make thy old, heroic dead leap back to life again;As Liberty's grand pæan rose above the ocean's roar,By millions 'twas reëchoed back from many a far-off shore.
No more the pallid brow of woe bent over famine graves,No longer freights of human hearts were borne across the waves;No more was felt the crushing weight of foreign tyrant's hand, But happy hearts and cheerful homes smiled over all the land.
Then 'mid the nations Erin sat, a nation blest and free,Her Sunburst floated, as of yore, afar o'er land and sea,And peace and plenty, hand in hand, her hills and valleys trod,For man no longer dared to curse a land so blessed by God.
Alas! my land, 't was but a dream, for thou art still a slave—The cherished dream of countless hearts now pulseless in the grave;But Hope still on the altar lives, and like electric fireIt leaps from patriot soul to soul, and never can expire.
Yet, Erin, by the martyred dead that on thy bosom lie,And by thy noble living hearts, whose hopes can never die,—By the darkness of the present, by the glory of the past,I feel that blessed vision must be realized at last.