All of the world was once America.
Or so, at least, an old philosopher
Once wrote, and, in his writing, meant to say,
“The state of nature,” raw and unpossessed;
A world where all lay still untouched by man;
Where lumber, iron, and coal and fertile soil
Awaited, raw materials to be shaped
And through such labor be made ours. Just so
It might have looked to those first weary travelers,
Their breaches dripping wet, their stomachs empty,
Their eyes in disbelief to see the towers
Of fir and cedar thrusting to the skies.
Even today, we sometimes think this country
Is young, the first of modern nations, and its roots
Are shallow, and its culture thin, its people
Still half unformed and severed from the past.
We think of Main Streets on the old frontier,
Their hasty, wooden buildings with false fronts,
Unpainted, crooked, and provisional,
The roads a filthy clabber of deep mud.
We think of modern suburbs and of strip malls,
Those places built for use but not to last,
Those places crowned with great electric signs,
Whose light bulbs chase a restless, racing circuit
To draw us for an hour off the highway.
They flash and fade away in desert darkness.
But this is not the truth of things, I think,
And not because the world was never empty;
And not because we found a mighty people
Already here, their ways long since established,
Their wisdom, skill, and cunning enviable.
Or, I should say, not only this. For when
Our ancestors first stood upon this land,
Full though it was of promise and abundance,
All that was missing were the laws of men
Such as they had been known for centuries.
This errand in the wilderness, this clearing
Beneath the trees—where pilgrims lit their fires,
Where brutal snow and cold would nearly starve them—
This soon would teach to them what we all know,
But eagerly have chosen to forget:
There is an older law than that of men.
And so it was, this awed and pious people,
They set about to build their earthly city
As best they could on just those lines that He
Who made all things first printed on the heart.
So Bradford, Gardner, Winthrop, and all those
Who sailed with them worked out a covenant
To bind themselves and, in those northern woods,
Set out to build a city on a hill.
And so, those generations on, when men
From up and down that rocky shelf of coast,
Convened in Philadelphia and declared
Their freedom to obey the laws of nature,
And pledged their sacred honor to that end.
And so it was, again, when Madison,
Found in a schoolroom cabinet a model
Of Sun and planets and the other stars;
He saw their ever-turning, stable order,
Concentric, balanced, grand yet peaceable,
A moving picture of eternity,
And took it for an image of our law.
We have invented nothing, they would say,
But only have appealed to that first frame
In shaping our more humble place to live,
As anyone with reason may discern.
If this was new, it was so in the sense
That truth is ever ancient, ever new.
And if, as one age passes to another,
These things seem far from us and passed away,
Or even lost beyond all recollection,
We need do nothing but remind ourselves
Of them and they’ll be with us once again.
Our nation is the place where we have settled,
Its landscapes planted, plowed, and harvested,
But it is also covenant and spirit,
And so expresses in its way of life
What lies beyond all time and history.
In this, America, however old,
Is yet reborn with every generation:
The first of modern nations, we might say,
But founded on an everlasting law.