Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ The Biblical parable involves a king visiting his people and making judgment: The Biblical goats/sheep allusion, incidentally, is to Matthew 25:31-46, which has become a touchstone passage in battles between rightwing white evangelicals and liberal Christians, with the latter asking why fundamentalists support a president who tears children from their parents and strives to strip the needy of health care. If the GOP doesn’t vote against a president who embraces racists, fascists, and anti-Semites, the Lowell would see them choosing the evil path. Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey. Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,įamished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, The poem as a whole is filled with slavery images, and while many of these are metaphorical, their frequency indicates that Lowell has the literal oppression of slaves on his mind.

On the other, there’s no question about how Lowell would have responded to the white supremacists who, at the direction of the president, stormed the Capitol. The senators have a momentous decision before them. On the one hand, although written in the trenchant tones of abolitionist Christianity, the sentiments seem unexceptional enough. Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,Īnd the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light. Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In his opening prayer, Senate Chaplain Barry Black quoted the well-known lines from James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis.” Furnishing the words to a once popular hymn, it impressed me as a member of the Otey Parish children’s choir–as in, “Wow, the church really means business.” Here’s the stanza from which Black quoted, with the lines he used bolded: Poetry began and ended the first day of Donald Trump’s Senate trial, and it may be significant that both poems were written during a time of factionalism reminiscent of the present day-which is to say, in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Longfellow poem sail forth