Yea – Once in the long history of the race,
There stood “The Lady with a Lamp,”
Strong and Kind of Face.
At that bright lamp eternal-rayed,
Multitudes have lighted
Little candles of skilled aid.
One who but now has laid aside human frame,
So trimmed and fed her bit of flame,
That its blazing rays up-tossed,
Fused into Humanity’s beacon;
The American Red Cross.
Hailed mid barren hills
And teeming towns,
Aye, in foreign lands;
Where’er valiant bands,
Seek to bind up wounds of wars,
Or wild nature’s aching scars,
Where there’s aught that breaks or mars lives
Of puny men, or kills,
The name Clara Noyes
Brought courage, cheer, and poise.
Greeted by courts and kings,
Busied with a great task and all it brings,
From near and far,
Yet ever the warm friend,
Constant as any star.
-Louise P. Yale
Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Class of 1916
Yale, Louise P. “Clara D. Noyes,” poem as printed in the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine 35, no. 3 (July 1936): 157-158.