(We can succeed only by concert...The dogmas of the quiet
past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high
with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is
new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves...DECEMBER
1, 1862, The President's Message to Congress.)
Be sad, be cool, be kind, remembering those now dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling
rain.
Be a brother, if so can be, to those beyond battle fatigue
each in his own corner of earth or forty fathoms undersea beyond all
boom of guns, beyond any bong of a great bell, each with a bosom and
number, each with a pack of secrets, each with a personal dream and
doorway and over them now the long endless winds with the low healing
song of time, the hush and sleep murmur of time.
Make your wit a guard and cover. Sing low, sing high,
sing wide. Let your laughter come free remembering looking toward peace:
"We must disenthrall ourselves."
Be a brother, if so can be, to those thrown forward for
taking hardwon lines, for holding hardwon points and their reward so-so,
little they care to talk about, their pay held in a mute calm, highspot
memories going unspoken, what they did being past words, what they took
being hardwon. Be sad, be kind, be cool.
Weep if you must
And weep open and shameless before these altars.
There are wounds past words. There are cripples less
broken than many who walk whole. There are dead youths with wrists of
silence who keep a vast music under their shut lips, what they did being
past words, their dreams like their deaths beyond any smooth and easy
telling, having given till no more to give.
There is dust alive with dreams of The Republic, with
dreams of the Family of Man flung wide on a shrinking globe with old
timetables, old maps, old guide-posts torn into shreds, shot into tatters,
burnt in a firewind, lost in the shambles, faded in rubble and ashes.
There is dust alive. Out of a granite tomb,
Out of a bronze sarcophagus,
Loose from the stone and copper
Steps a whitesmoke ghost
Lifting an authoritative hand In the name of dreams worth dying for,
In the name of men whose dust breathes of those dreams so worth dying
for, what they did being past words, beyond all smooth and easy telling.
Be sad, be kind, be cool, remembering, under God, a dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue
sea. faces warblown in a falling rain.
Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Make your wit a guard
and cover. Let your laughter come free like a help and a brace of comfort.
The earth laughs, the sun laughs over every wise harvest
of man, over man looking toward peace by the light of the hard old teaching:
"We must disenthrall ourselves."
Read as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Mother Chapter of William and
Mary College, Williamsburg, Virginia, December 1944 Published in the
Saturday Evening Post, February, 1945.
Carl Sandburg
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Revised and Expanded
Edition, 1970. Harcourt Brace & Company.
