Just as I like putting up AA Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”, I like this Richard Wilbur bit for every Independence Day. Here’s a reprint of what I had up last year:
Richard Wilbur is one of our greatest poets. 22 (23) years ago, he wrote a fine long poem for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. These two stanzas from that poem move me still, and they describe perfectly a most imperfect and yet not-unpraiseworthy country. If the great E.M. Forster could give two cheers, not three, for democracy, then we who call ourselves citizens of the world first can give at least one solid cheer for the USA.
From all that has shamed us, what can we salvage?
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong,
That we need not lie, that our books are open.
Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Praise to this land that its most oppressed
Have marched in peace from the dark of the past
To speak in our time and in Washington’s shadow,
Their invincible hope to be free at last…
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong. And only those, perhaps, who acknowledge the depth and the scope of the wrongs can have an honesty to their pride.
I’ve always liked this stanza from earlier in the same poem:
It was an English thought
That there is no just government
Unless by free consent,
And in that English cause we fought.