Ay, shout! 'Tis the day of your pride,
Ye despots and tyrants of earth!
Tell your serfs the American name to deride,
And to rattle their fetters in mirth.
Ay, shout! for the league of the Free
Is about to be shivered to dust,
And the rent limbs to fall from the vigorous tree,
Wherein Liberty put her firm trust.
Shout! shout! for more firmly established will be
Your thrones and dominions beyond the blue sea.

Laugh on! for such folly supreme
The world had yet never beheld;
And ages to come will the history deem
A tale by antiquity swelled:
For nothing that Time has upbuilt
And set in the annals of crime,
So stupid and senseless, so wretched in guilt,
Darkens sober tradition or rhyme.
It will be, like the fable of Eblis' fall,
A byword of mocking and horror to all.

Ye mad, who would raze out your name
From the League of the Proud and the Free,
And a pitiful, separate sovereignty claim,
Like a lone wave flung off from the sea;
Oh, pause ere you plunge into the chasm,
That yawns in your traitorous way!
Ere Freedom, convulsed with one terrible spasm,
Desert you forever and aye!
Pause! think! ere the earthquake astonish your soul,
And the thunders of war through your green valleys roll!

Good God! what a title, what name
Will History give to your crime!
In the deepest abyss of dishonor and shame,
Ye will writhe till the last hour of time;
As braggarts who forged their own chains,
Pulled down what their brave fathers built,
And tainted the blood in their children's young veins
With the poison of slavery and guilt:
And Freedom's bright heart be hereafter, tenfold,
For your folly and fall, more discouraged and cold.

What flag shall float over the fires
And the smoke of your patricide war,
Instead of the stars and broad stripes of your sires?
A lone, pale, dim, flickering star,
With a thunder-cloud veiling its glow
As it faints away into the sea:
Will the Eagle's wing shelter and shield you? Ah, no!
His wing shelters only the free.
Miscall it, disguise it, boast, rant as you will,
You are traitors, misled by your mad leaders still.

Turn, turn then! Cast down in your might
The pilots that sit at the helm;
Steer, steer your proud ship from the gulf which dark night
And treason and fear overwhelm!
Turn back!—From your mountains and glens,
From your swamps, from the rivers and sea;
From forest and precipice, cavern and den,
Where your brave fathers bled to be free,
From the graves where those glorious patriots lie,
Re-echoes the warning, 'Turn back, or ye die!'