HISPANIA! O, Hispania! once my home –
How hath thy fall degraded every son
Who owns thee for a birth-place. They who walk
Thy marbled courts and holy sanctuaries,
Or tread thy olive groves, and pluck the grapes
That cluster there – or dance the saraband
By moonlight, to some Moorish melody –
Or whistle with the Muleteer, along
Thy goat-climbed rocks and awful precipices;
How do the nations scorn them and deride!
And they who wander where a Spanish tongue
Was never heard, and where a Spanish heart
Had never beat before, how poor, how shunned,
Avoided, undervalued, and debased,
Move they among the foreign multitudes!
Once I was bright to the world’s eye, and passed
Among the nobles of my native land
In Spain’s armorial bearings, decked and stampt
With Royalty’s insignia, and I claimed
And took the station of my high descent;
But the cold world has cut a cantle out
From my escutcheon- and now here I am,
A poor, depreciated pistareen.
(John Gardiner Calkins Brainard)
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Based on Topics: World PoemsBased on Keywords: marbled, birth-place, insignia, sanctuaries, stampt, escutcheon, armorial, saraband, muleteer, hispania, undervalued