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ARMISTICE DAY
I wake at the touch of morning: and the City is shaken with a Song!
Not rapture smoothed and rhythmed, but the wild peal of horns, gongs, whistles, bells and drum-beats,
Making a strange concordance on the air!
Bass-notes of guns and ecstasy of bells—
Bells above all,
Bells bright as water tumbling down a chasm,
Bells like the lost chime of the hammers of Babel!
Bells tracing arabesques of laughter on the discord of the dawn!
I hear a voice in the shadow crying:
"They have signed the armistice; the war is done."
And I lean from my window and see the crowds surging below me, with white hands thrust up as though to shake a music from the stars!
Women with vivid faces, marching, singing,
Dark men of labor, carrying burnished little pails,
