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Lay for the Day 26th
January
1784: in a letter to his daughter, Benjamin Franklin expresses his dissatisfaction
with the eagle as the symbol of America (it had been incorporated into
the Great Seal of the United States two years before). Franklin said the
eagle was a Bird of bad moral character, like those among Men who
live by sharping and robbing. His tongue perhaps a little in his
cheek, he proposed instead the turkey, a much more respectable bird.
In 1775, however, in a letter to the Pennsylvania Journal, Franklin
had suggested a different national emblem altogether the rattlesnake,
for a number of ingenious reasons, among them that "she never begins
an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders.
XI. The Eagle
I never loved so fervently
before:
Before were prophecies and shadowings.
The greatest birds stretch
out the most slow wings
And do not hasten to the hours they soar.
Before were sparrow-flights, short and unsure,
Fast-beating, full of comings and goings
From hedge to hedge, flung out like winnowings.
Now loves eagle eyes vale and open moor.
But
the eagles sudden and love is meek;
High-born
one, while the other is lowly,
And
stakes no claim on clouds down which to glide
To strike
at the lamb with imperious beak.
No fault
surpasses the false-named holy:
Do not
let me, love, mistake love for pride.
John
Gibbens
from Legacy
The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar
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