Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
“Bright as the bow that spans the storm
In Erin’s yellow vesture clad,
A son of light—a lovely form
He comes and makes her glad;
Now on the grass-green turf he sits,
His tassel’d horn beside him laid;
Now o’er the hills in chase he its,
The hunter and the deer a shade!”
3.13.3 “On Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man”
(1795)
Thus briey sketch’d the sacred Rights of Man,
How inconsistent with the Royal Plan!
Which for itself exclusive honour craves,
Where some are masters born, and millions slaves.
With what contempt must every eye look down
On that base, childish bauble call’d a crown,
The gilded bait, that lures the crowd, to come,
Bow down their necks, and meet a slavish doom;
The source of half the miseries men endure,
The quack that kills them, while it seems to cure.
Rous’d by the Reason of his manly page,
Once more shall Paine a listening world engage:
From Reason’s source, a bold reform he brings,
In raising up mankind, he pulls down kings,
Who, source of discord, patrons of all wrong,
On blood and murder have been fed too long:
Hid from the world, and tutor’d to be base,
The curse, the scourge, the ruin of our race,
Theirs was the task, a dull designing few,
To shackle beings that they scarcely knew,
Who made this globe the residence of slaves,
And built their thrones on systems form’d by knaves—
Advance, bright years, to work their nal fall,
And haste the period that shall crush them all.
Who, that has read and scann’d the historic page
But glows, at every line, with kindling rage,
To see by them the rights of men aspers’d,
Freedom restrain’d, and Nature’s law revers’d,
Men, rank’d with beasts, by monarchs will’d away,
And bound young fools, or madmen to obey:
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