Sir, we approve your curling lip and noseAt this vile sight.These men, these women are brute beasts?—Who knows,Sir, but that you are right?
Panders and harlots, rogues and thieves and worse,We are a crewWhose pitiful plunder’s honoured in the purseOf gentlemen like you.
Whom holy Competition’s taught (like us)“What’s thine is mine!”—How we must love you who have made us thus,You may perhaps divine!
Man of despair and death,Bought and slaved in the gangs,Starved and stripped and leftTo the pitiful pitiless night,Away with your selfish thoughts!Touch not your ignorant life!Are there no masters of slaves,Jeering, cynical, strong—Are there no brigands (say),With the words of Christ on their lipsAnd the daggers under their cloaks—Is there not one of theseThat you can steal on and kill?O as the Swiss mountaineerDogged on the perilous heightsHis disciplined conqueror foes:[39a]Caught up one in his armsAnd, laughing exultantly,Plunged with him to the abyss:So let it be with you!An eye for an eye, and a toothFor a tooth, and a life for a life!Tell it, this hateful strongContemptuous hypocrite world,Tell it that, if we must liveAs dogs and as worse than dogs,At least we can die like men!Tell it there is a woeNot for the conquered alone![39b]An eye for an eye,and a toothFor a tooth,and a life for a life!
In the chill grey summer dawn-lightWe pass through the empty streets;The rattling wheels are all silent;No friend his fellow greets.
Here and there, at the corners,A man in a great-coat stands;A bayonet hangs by his side, andA rifle is in his hands.
This is a conquered city;It speaks of war not peace;And that’s one of the English soldiersThe English call “police.”
You see, at the present momentThat noble country of mineIs boiling with indignationAt the memory of a “crime.”
In a path in the Phœnix Park whereThe children romped and ran,An Irish ruffian met his doom,And an English gentleman.
For a hundred and over a hundredYears on the country sideMen and women and childrenHave slaved and starved and died,
That those who slaved and starved themMight spend their earnings then,And the Irish ruffians have a “good time,”And the English gentlemen.
And that’s why at the present momentThat noble country of mineIs boiling with indignationAt the memory of a “crime.”
For the Irish ruffians (they tell me),And it looks as if ’twere true,And the English gentlemen are so scarce,We could not spare those two!
In the chill grey summer dawn-lightWe pass through the empty streets;The rattling wheels are all silent;No friend his fellow greets.
Here and there, at the corners,A man in a great-coat stands;A bayonet hangs by his side, andA rifle is in his hands.
This is a conquered city;It speaks of war not peace;And that’s one of the English soldiersThe English call “police.”
. . . I went the other dayTo see the birds and beasts they keep enmewedIn the London Zoo. One of the first I saw—One of the first I noticed, was an eagle.Ragged, befouled, within his iron barsHe sat without a movement or a sound,And, when I stood and pitying looked at him,I saw his great sad eyes that winkless gazedOut to the horizon sky. I passed from there,And walked about the gardens, hither and thither,Till all the afternoon was spent. Returning thenTo seek my home, again by chance I passedThe eagle’s cage, and stood again, and looked,And saw his great sad eyes that winkless gazedOut to the horizon sky. So I went home . . .The eagle is Ireland!
O we have loved you through cold and rainAnd pitiless frost,Consuming our offering of blood and of brainGladly again and again and again,Though it all seemed lost,Ireland, Ireland!
O we will fight, fight on for you tillYour anguish is past,The wronged ones righted, the tyrants still.—Though God has not saved you, yet we will,At the last, at the last,Ireland, Ireland!
O we will love you in warmth and lightAnd the happy day,When you have forgotten the terrible night,Standing proud and beautiful brightFor ever and aye,Ireland, Ireland!
One thing we praise you for that is past praise—The dauntless eyes that faced the rain and night,The hand that never wearied in the fight,Till, through the dark’s despair, the dawn’s delays,It rose, that vision of forgotten days,Ireland, a nation in her right and might,As fearless of the lightning as the Light,—Freedom, the noon-tide sun that shines and stays!O brave, O pure, O hater of the wrong,(The wrong that is as one with England’s name,Tyranny with cant of liberty, and shameWith boast of righteousness), to you belongTrust for the hate that blinds our foes like flame,Love for the hope that makes our hearts so strong!
. . . They caught them at the bend. He and his sonSat in the car, revolvers in their laps.From either side the stone-walled wintry roadThere flashed thin fire-streaks in the rainy dusk.The father swayed and fell, shot through the chest.The son was up, but one more fire-streak leapedClose from the pitch-black of a thick-set bushNot five yards from him, and lit all the faceOf him whose sweetheart walked the Dublin streetsFor lust of him who gave one yell and fellFlat on the stony road, a sweltering corse.Then they came out, the men who did this thing,And looked upon their hatred’s retribution,While heedlessly the rattling car fled on.Grey-haired old wolf, your letch for peasants’ blood,For peasants’ sweat turned gold and silver and bronze,Is done, is done, for ever and ever is done!O foul young fox, no more young girls’ fresh lipsShall bruise and bleed to cool your lecher’s lust.Slowly from out the great high terraced cloudsThe round moon sailed. The dead were left alone.
* * * * *
I talked with one of those who did this thing,A coughing half-starved lad, mere skin and bone.I said: “They found upon those dead men, gold.Why did you not take it?” Then with proud-raised head,He looked at me and said: “Sorr,we’re not thaves!”
Brother,from up the maimed and mangled earth,Strewn with our flesh and bones,wet with our blood,Let that great word go up to unjust heavenAnd smite the cheek of the devil they’ve called“God!”
Crouched in the terrible land,The circle of pitiless ice,With frozen bloody feetAnd her pestilential summer’sFever-throb in her brow,Look, in her deep slow eyesThe mists of her sleep of faithStir, and a gleam of light,The ray of a blood-red sun,Beams out into the dusk.From far away, from the west,From the east, from the south, there comeFaint sweet breaths of the breezeOf plenteous warmth and light.And she moves, and around her neckShe feels the iron-scaled SnakeWhose fangs suck at the heartHid by her tattered dress,By her lean and hanging teat.Russia, O land of faith,O realm of the ageless Slav,O oppressed one of eternity,This darkest hour is the hour,The hour of the coming dawn!Europe the rank, the corrupt,Lies stretched out at your feet.Turkey, India, lo all,East and south, it is yours!
Years, years ago a nation,[44]Oppressed as you are oppressed,Burst her bonds and leaped out,A volcanic sea-wave of fire,Quenched at last but in blood,Though not before the red sprayDashed the Pyramids, the Escurial,Rome and your own grey Kremlin.That was the great sea-waveOf a nation that disbelieved,Of a nation that had not faith!What shall the sea-wave beOf this race of eternal belief,This nation of a passionate faith?
I stood in Père-la-Chaise. The putrid city,Paris, the harlot of the nations, lay,The bug-bright thing that knows not love nor pity,Flashing her bare shame to the summer’s day.
Here where I stand, they slew you, brothers, whomHell’s wrongs unutterable had made as mad.The rifle-shots re-echoed in his tomb,The gilded scoundrel’s who had been so glad.
O Morny, O blood-sucker of thy race!O brain, O hand that wrought out empire thatThe lust in one for power, for tinsel place,Might rest; one lecher’s hungry heart grow fat,—
Is it for nothing, now and evermore,O you whose sin in life had death in ease,The murder of your victims beats the doorWherein your careless carrion lies at peace?
She.—“Up and down,up and down,From early eve to early day.Life is quicker in the town;When you’ve leisure,anyway!
“Down and up,down and up!O will no one stop and speak?I would really like to sup,And my limbs are heavy and weak.
“What’s my price,sir?I’m no Jew.If with me you wish to sleep,’Tis five francs,sir.Surely youWill admit that that is cheap?”
He.—“Christ, if you are not stone blind,Stone deaf also, you know it isChristian towns leave far behindSodom and those other cities.
“Bid your Father strike this town,Wipe it utterly away!Weary, hungry, up and downFrom early eve to early day?
“Magdalen knew nought like this;She had food and roof above;Seven devils, too, did she possess;This poor soul had but one—love!
“O my sister, take me, kill me!I am one of those who onceOnly cared to feast and fill meOn these robbed and murdered ones.
“Kill me? Nay, but love me; listen.I have too a gospel word,Fit to make still, dull eyes glisten,And, like Christ’s, it brings a sword!
“No, Christ is not deaf nor blind;He’s but dust in Syrian ground,And his Father has declinedTo a parson’s phrase, a sound.
“Not by such, then, but byusThese hell-wrongs must be redressed.Take this morsel venomous;Nourish it within your breast.
“You must live on, live and hate;Conquer wrath, despair and pain;For “we bid you hope” and waitTill the Red Flag flies again:
“Till once more the people rise,Once more, once and only once,Blood-red hands and blazing eyesOf the robbed and murdered ones!
“So good night, dear desperate heart.(Nay, ’tis sun-bright day we keep.)Soon we meet, though now we part.Kiss me . . . Take it . . . Go and sleep!”
Come then, let us at least know what’s the truth.Let us not blink our eyes and sayWe did not understand; old age or youthBenumbed our sense or stole our sight away.
It is a lie—just that, a lie—to declareThat wages are the worth of work.No; they are what the Employer wills to spareTo let the Employee sheer starvation shirk.
They’re the life-pittance Competition leaves,The least for which brother’ll slay brother.He who the fruits of this hell-strife receives,He is a thief, an assassin, and none other!
It is a lie—just that, a lie—to declareThat Rent’s the interest on just gains.Rent’s the thumb-screw that makes the worker shareWith him who worked not the produce of his pains.
Rent’s the wise tax the human tape-worm knows.The fat he takes; the life-lean leaves.The holy Landlord is, as we suppose,Just this—the model of assassin-thieves!
What is the trick the rich-man, then, contrives?How play my lords their brilliant rôles?—They live on the plunder of our toiling lives,The degradation of our bodies and souls!
Grave this deep in your hearts,Forget not the tale of the past!Never, never believeThat any will help you, or can,Saving only yourselves!What have the gentlemen done,Peerless haters of wrong,Byrons and Shelleys, what?They stand great famous names,Demi-gods to their own,Shadows far off, alienTo us and ours for ever.Those who love them and hateThe crime, the injustice they hated,What can they do but shout,Win a name from our woes,And leave us just as we were?No, but resolutely turned,Our wants, our desires made clear,And clear the means that shall win them,Drill and drill and drill!Then when the day is come,When the royal battle-flag’s up,When blood has been spilled in vainIn timid half-hearted war,Then let the Cromwell rise,The simple, the true-souled man;Then let Grant come forth,The calm, the determined comrade,But deep in their hearts one hate,Deep in their souls one thought,To bring the iniquity low,To make the People free!Ah, for such as theseWe with the same heart-hate,We with the same soul-thought,Will fall to our destined placesIn the ranks of the great New Model,[49]In the Army that sees aheadMarston, Naseby, Whitehall,The Wilderness, Petersburg,—yes,But beyond the blood and the smoke,Beyond the struggle and death,The Union victorious safe,The Commonwealth glorious free!
You tell me these great lords have raised up Art:I say they have degraded it. Look you,When ever did they let the poet sing,The painter paint, the sculptor hew and cast,The music raise her heavenly voice, exceptTo praise them and their wretched rule o’er men?Behold our English poets that were poorSince these great lords were rich and held the state:Behold the glories of the German land,Poets, musicians, driven, like them, to deathUnless they’d tune their spirits’ harps to playDrawing-room pieces for the chattering foolsWho aped the taste for Art or for a leer.Go to, no Art was ever noble yet,Noble and high, the speech of godlike men,When fetters bound it, be they gold or flowers.All that is noblest, highest, greatest, best,Comes from the Galilean peasant’s hut, comes fromThe Stratford village, the Ayrshire plough, the shopThat gave us Chaucer, the humble Milton’s trade—Bach’s, Mozart’s, great Beethoven’s,—And these are theyWho knew the People, being what they knew!Go to, if in the future years no strain,No picture of earth’s glory like to whatYour Artists raised for that small clique or thisOf supercilious imbecilities—O if no better demi-gods of ArtCan rise save those whose barbarous tinsel yetMakes hideous all the beauty of old homes—Then let us seek the comforts of despairIn democratic efforts dead and gone:Weep with Pheideian Athens, sigh an hourWith Raffaelle’s Florence, beat the head and breastO’er Shakspere’s England that from Milton’s tookIn lips the name that leaped from lead and flameFrom out her heart against the Spanish guns!
. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me,Importuning, one wet and mild March night.We walked and talked together. O her taleWas very common; thousands know it all!Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming;Parents that railed; London; the child born dead;A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls“Taken on” a few months at a dressmaker’sIn the crush of the “season;” thirteen shillings a week!The fashionable people’s dresses done,And they flown off, these fifty extra girlsSent—to the streets: that is, to work that givesScarcely enough to buy the decent clothesRespectable employers all demandOr speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!And she—“Why,I have gone on down and down,And there’s the gutter,look,that I shall die in!”“My dear,” I say, “where hope of all but thatIs gone, ’tis time, I think, life were gone too.”She looks at me. “That I should kill myself?”—“That you should kill yourself.”—“That would be sin,And God would punish me!”—“And will not GodPunish for this?” She pauses: then whispers:“No,no,He will forgive me,for He knows!”I laughed aloud: “And you,” she said, “and you,Who are so good,so noble” . . . “Noble? Good?”I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat.O my poor darling, O my little lost sheepOf this vast flock that perishes aloneOut in the pitiless desert!—Yet she’d speak:She’d ask me: she’d entreat: she’d demonstrate.O I must not say that! I must believe!Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the skySo big and blue and pure above it all?O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep,Entreat no more and demonstrate no more;For I believe thereisa God, a GodNot in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no,But in the heart of man, on the dear lipsOf angel women, of heroic men!O hopeless wanderer that would not stay,(“It is too late,I cannot rise again!”)O saint of faith in love behind the veils,(“You must believe in God,for you are good!”),O sister who made holy with your kiss,Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of MarchThere in the hideous infamous London streetsMy cheek, and made my soul a sacred place,O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep!
Comrade, yet a little further I would go before the nightCloses round and chills in darkness all the glorious sunset light—Yet a little, by the cliff there, till the stately home I seeOf the man who once was with us, comrade once with you and me!Nay, but leave me, pass alone there; stay awhile and gaze againOn the various-jewelled waters and the dreamy southern main,For the evening breeze is sighing in the quiet of the hillsMoving down in cliff and terrace to the singing sweet sea-rills,While the river, silent-stealing, thro’ the copse and thro’ the leaWinds her waveless way eternal to the welcome of the sea.Yes, within that green-clad homestead, gardened grounds and velvet easeOf a home where culture reigneth and the chambers whisper peace,Is the man, the seer and singer, who (ah, years and years away!)Lifted up a face of gladness at the breaking of the day.For the noontide’s desperate ardours that had seen the Roman townWrap the boy Keats, “by the hungry generations trodden down,”In his death-shroud with the ashes of the fairy child of storm,Fluttering skylark in the breakers, caught and smothered by the foam,And had closed those eyes heroic, weary for the final peace.Byron maimed and maddened, strangled in the anguish that was Greece—For this noontide passed to darkness, brooding doubt and wild dismay,Where the silly sparrows chirruped and the eagles swooped away,Till once more the trampled Peoples and the murdered soul of manRaised a haggard face half-wondering where the new-born day began,Where the sign of Faith’s renewal, Faith’s, and Hope’s, and Love’s, outgrewIn the golden sun arising; and we hailed it, we and you!O you hailed it, and your heart beat, and your pretty woman’s lays,In the fathomless vibration of our rapturous amaze,Died for ever on your harpstrings, and you rose and struck a chordHigh, full, clear, heroic, godlike, “for the glory of the Lord!”Noble words you spoke; we listened; and we dreamed the day had comeWhen the faith of God and Christ should sound one cry with Man’s freedom—When the men who stood beside us, eager with hell’s troops to cope,Radiant, thrilled exultant, proud, with the magnificence of hope!“Forward! forward!” ran our watch-word. “Forward! forward!” by our sideYou gave back the glorious summons. Would that day that you had died!Better lying fallen, death-struck, breathless, bleeding, on your face,With your bright sword pointing onward, dying happy in your place!Better to have passed in spirit from the battle-storm’s eclipseWith the great Cause in your heart and with the war-shout on your lips!Better to have fallen charging, having known the nobler time,In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line—Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead,Up the slopes and thro’ the smoke-clouds, thro’ the dying and the dead,Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout,On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brainThat remembered Egypt’s flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed again—Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills,And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills.There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves,(Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of slaves,Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stewWhere freedom “broadens down” so slow it stops with lords and you!O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes,Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times,Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet knightsTilted gaily or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights?O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best,Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not rest—Men of science, “vivisectors!”—democrats, the “rout of beasts”—Writers, essayists and poets, “Belial’s prophets, Moloch’s priests!”Coward, you have made the great refusal? you have won the gilded praiseOf the wringers of his heart’s-blood from the peasant’s sunless days,Of the lord and the land-owner, of the rich man who has boundLabour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the ground,With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had,Crying, “Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them mad!”Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to takeWhat of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood’s sake,Blustering long and loudest at the hideousness and painThese you praise have brought upon us; blustering long and loud againAt our agony and anguish in this desperate fight of ours,Grappling with anarch custom and the darkness and the powers!O begone, then, from among us! Echo not, however faint,Our great watch-word, our great war-shout, sweet and sickly poet-saint!Sit there dreaming in your gardens, looking out upon the sea,Till the night-time closes round you and the wind is on the lea.Enter then within your chambers in the rich and quiet light;Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night.Soothe your fancy with your visions; bend a gracious senile earTo the praise your guests are murmuring in the tone you love to hear.Honoured of your Queen, and honoured of the gentlest and the best,Lord and commoner and rich-man, smirking tenant, shopman, priest,All distinguished and respectable, the shiny sons of light,O what, O what are these who call you coward in the night?Ay, what are we who struggled for the cause of Science, say,Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Häckel, marshalling our stern array?We who raised the cry for Culture, Goethe’s spirit leading on,Marching gladly with our captains, Renan, Arnold, Emerson?We, we are not tinkers, tinkers of the kettle cracked and broke,Tailors squatted cross-legged, patching at the greasy worn-out cloak!We are those that faced mad Fortune, cried: “The Truth, and only she!Onward, upward! If we perish, we at least will perish free!”We have lost our souls to win them, in the house and in the streetFalling stabbed and poisoned, making a victory of defeat.We have lost the happy present, we have paid death’s heavy debt,We have won, have won the Future, and its sons shall not forget!Enter, then, within your chamber in the rich and quiet light;Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night;Spread your nostrils to the incense, hearken to the murmured hymnOf the praising people, rising from the temple fair and dim.Ah, but we here in the tempest, we here struggling in the night,See the worshippers out-stealing; see the temple emptying quite;See the godhead turning ghostlike; see the pride of name and famePaling slowly, sad and sickly, with forgetfulness and shame! . . .Darker, darker grows the night now, louder, louder cries the wind;I can hear the dash of breakers and the deep sea moves behind,I can see the ghostlike phalanx rushing on the crumbling shore,Slowly but surely shattering its rampart evermore.And my comrade’s voice is calling, and his solitary cryOn the great dark swift air-currents like Fate’s summons sweepeth by.Farewell, then, whom once I loved so, whom a boy I thrilled to hearUrging courage and reliance, loathing acquiescent fear.I must leave you; I must wander to a strange and distant land,Facing all that Fate shall give me with her hard unequal hand—I once more anew must face them, toil and trouble and disease,But these a man may face and conquer, for there waits him death and peaceAnd the freedom from dishonour and denial e’er confessedOf what he knows is truest, what most beautiful and best!O farewell, then! I must leave you. You have chosen. You are right.You have made the great refusal; you have shunned the wind and night.You have won your soul, and won it—No, not lost it, as they tell—Happy, blest of gods and monarchs, O a long, a long farewell!Freshwater,Isle of Wight.
Two little darlings alone,Clinging hand in hand;Two little girls come outTo see the wonderful land!
Here round the flaring stallsThey stand wide-eyed in the throng,While the great, the eloquent hucksterPerorates loud and long.
They watch those thrice-blessed mortals,The dirty guzzling boys,Who partake of dates, periwinkles,Ices and other joys.
And their little mouths go wide openAt some of the brilliant sightsThat little darlings may see in the roadOf Edgware on Saturday nights.
The eldest’s name is Susannah;She was four years old last May.And Mary-Jane, the youngest,Is just three years old to-day.
And I know all about their cat, andTheir father and mother too,And “Pigshead,” their only brother,Who got his head jammed in the flue.
Andtheyknow several particularsOf a similar sort of me,For we went up and down togetherFor over an hour, we three.
And Susannah walked beside me,As became the wiser and older,Fast to one finger, but Mary-JaneSat solemnly up on my shoulder.
And we bought some sweets, and a monkeyThat climbed up a stick “quite nice.”And then last we adjourned for refreshments,And the ladies had each an ice.
And Susannah’s ice was a pink one,And she sucked it up so quick,But Mary-Jane silently profferedHer ice to me for a lick.
And then we went home to mother,And we found her upon the floor,And father was trying to balanceHis shoulders against the door.
And Susannah said “O” and “Please, sir,We’ll go in ourselves, sir!” AndWe kissed one another and parted,And they stole in hand in hand.
And it’s O for my two little darlingsI never shall see again,Though I stand for the whole night watchingAnd crying here in the rain!
“This is the steamer’s pit.The ovens like dragons of fireGlare thro’ their close-lidded eyesWith restless hungry desire.
“Down from the tropic nightRushes the funnelled air;Our heads expand and fall in;Our hearts thump huge as despair.
“’Tis we make the bright hot bloodOf this throbbing inanimate thing;And our life is no less the fuelThan the coal we shovel and fling.
“And lest of this we be proudOr anything but meek,We are well cursed and paid—Ten shillings a week!”
Round,round,round in its tunnelThe shaft turns pitiless strong,While lost souls cry out in the darkness:“How long,O Lord,how long?”
Up from the oven pit,The hell where poor men toil,At the sunset hour he comesClean-clothed, washed from soil.
On the fo’c’s’le head he kneels,His face to the hallowed West.He prays, and bows and prays.Does he pray for death and rest?
O India, India, O my lovely land—At whose sweet throat the greedy English snake,With fangs and lips that suck and never slake,Clings, while around thee, band by stifling band,The loathsome shape twists, chaining foot and hand—O from this death-swoon must thou never wake,From limbs enfranchised these foul fetters to shake,And, proud among the nations, to rise and stand?Nay, but thine eyes, thine eyes wherein there staysThe patience of that august faith that scornsThe tinsel creed of Christ, dream still and gazeWhere, not within the timeless East and haze,The haunt of that wan moon with fading horns,There breaks the first of Himalayan morns!
There was a time when all thy sons were proudTo speak thy name,England, when Europe echoed back aloudThy fearless fame:
When Spain reeled shattered helpless from thy gunsAnd splendid ire,When from Canadian snows to Indian sunsPitt’s soul was fire.
O that in days like these were, fair and freeFrom shame and scorn,Fate had allowed, benignly, pityinglyThat I was born!
O that, if struck, then struck with glorious wounds,I bore apart(Not torn with fangs of leprous coward hounds)My bleeding heart!
We hate you—not because of cruel deedsStaining a glorious effort. They who liveLearn in this earth to give and to forgive,Where heart and soul are noble and fate’s needsImperious: No, nor yet that cruel seedsOf power and wrong you’ve sown alternative,We hate you, we your sons who yet believeThat truth and justice are not empty creeds!No, but because of greed and golden pay,Wages of sin and death: because you smotherYour conscience, making cursèd all the day.Bible in one hand, bludgeon in the other,Cain-like you come upon and slay your brother,And, kneeling down, thank God for it, and pray!
I whom you fed with shame and starved with woe,I wheel above you,Your fatal vulture, for I hate you so,I almost love you!
I smell your ruin out. I light and croakMy sombre lore,As swaggering you go by, O heart of oakRotten to the core!
Look westward! Ireland’s vengeful eyes are castOn freedom won.Look eastward! India stirs from sleep at last.You are undone!
Look southward, where Australia hears your voice,And turns away!O brutal hypocrite, she makes her choiceWith the rising day!
Foul Esau, you who sold your high birthrightFor gilded mud,Who did the wrong and, priestlike, called it right,And swindled God!
The hour is gone of insult,pain and patience;The hour is comeWhen they arise,the faithful mightier nations,To drag you down!
England, the land I lovedWith passionate pride,For hate of whom I liveWho for love had died,
Can I, while shines the sun,That hour regainWhen I again may come to theeAnd love again?
No, not while that flagOf greed and lustFlaunts in the air, untaughtTo drag the dust!—
Never, till expiant,I see you kneel,And, brandished, gleams aloftThe foeman’s steel!
Ah, then to speed, and laugh,As my heart caught the knife:“Mother,I love you!Here,Here is my life!”
At anchor in that harbour of the island,The Chinese gate,We lay where, terraced under green-clad highland,The sea-town sate.
Ships, steamers, sailors, many a flag and nation,A motley crew,Junks, sampans, all East’s swarming jubilation,I watched and knew.
Then, as I stood, sweet sudden sounds out-swellingOn the boon breeze,The church-bells’ chiming echoes rang out, tellingOf inland peace.
O English chimes, your music rising and fallingI cannot praise,Although to me it come sweet-sad recallingDear childish days.
Yet, English chimes,—last links of chains that sever,Worn out and done,That land and creed that I have left for ever,—Ring on, ring on!
There is much in this sea-way cityI have not met with before,But one or two things I noticeThat I seem to have known of yore.
In the lovely tropical verdure,In the streets, behold I canThe hideous English buildingsAnd the brutal English man!
I stand and watch the soldiersMarching up and down,Above the fresh green cricket-groundJust outside the town.
I stand and watch and wonderWhen in the English landThis poor fool Tommy AtkinsWill learn and understand?
Zulus, and Boers, and Arabs,All fighting to be free,Men and women and children,Murdered and maimed has he.
In India and in IrelandHe’s held the People down,While the robber English gentlemanTook pound and penny and crown.
To make him false to his order,What was it that they gave—To make him his brother’s oppressor?The clothes and pay of a slave!
O thou poor fool, Tommy Atkins,Thou wilt be wise that dayWhen, with eager eyes and clenched teeth,Thou risest up to say:
“This is our well-loved England,And I’ll free it,if I can,From every rotten bourgeoisAnd played-out gentleman!”
There is a valley green that lies’Mid hills, the summer’s bower.The many coloured butterfliesFlutter from flower to flower.
And round one lush green side of it,In gardened homes are laid,With grief and care compassionate,The people of the dead.
There all the voicing summer dayThey sing, the happy rills.No noisy sound awakes awayThe echo of the hills.
Up in the misty morning,Up past the gardened hills,With the rhythmic stroke of the rowers,While the blue deep pales and thrills!
Past the rice-fields green low-lying,Where the sea-gull’s winging downFrom the fleets of junks and sampansAnd the ancient Chinese Town!
From the bright and blinding sunshine,From the whirling locust’s song,Into the dark and narrow fissuresOf the streets I am borne along.
Here and there dusky-beamingA sun-shaft broadens and dropsOn the brown bare crowd slow-passingThe crowd of the open shops.
We move on over the bridgesWith their straight-hewn blocks of stone.And their quaint grey animal figures,And the booths the hucksters own.
Behind a linen awningSits an ancient wight half-dead,And a little dear of a girl isExamining—his head.
On a bended bamboo shouldered,Bearing a block of stone,Two worn-out coolies half-nakedUtter their grunting groan.
Children, almond-eyed beauties,Impossibly mangy curs,Take part in the motley stream ofInsouciant passengers.
This is the dream, the visionThat comes to me and greets—The vision of RetributionIn the labyrinthine streets!
These Chinese toil and yet they do not starve,And they obey, and yet they are not slaves.It is the “free-born” fuddled EnglishmenThat grovel rotting in their living graves.
These Chinese do not fawn with servile lips;They lift up equal eyes that ask and scan.Their degradation has escaped at leastThat choicest curse of all—the gentleman!
“Yes, I used always to thinkThat you Russians knewHow to make the good drinkAs none others do.
“And I thought moreover,(Not with the epicures),You might search the world overFor such women as yours.
“In both these matters nowI perceive I was right,And I really can’t tell you howMuch I delight
“In my third (Thanks, another cup!)Idea of the fun,When your country gets upAnd follows the sun!
“And just as in Europe, see,There’s a conqueror nation,So why not in Asia beA like jubilation?
“Taught as well as organized,[69b]The eternal Coolie,From being robbed and despised,Takes to cutting throats duly!
“But—please, don’t be flurried;For I daresay by thenYou’ll be comfortably buried,Ladies and gentlemen!
“No more, thanks! I must be going!I’m so glad to have made thisOpportunity of knowingSome more Russian ladies!”
Simple you were, and good. No kindlier heartBeat than the heart within your gentle breast.Labour you had, and happiness, and rest,And were the maid of nations. Now you startTo feverish life, feeling the poisonous smartUpon your lips of harlot lips close-pressed,The lips of her who stands among the restWith greasy righteous soul and rotten heart.O sunrise land, O land of gentleness,What madness drives you to lust’s dreadful bed?O thrice accursèd England, wretchednessFor ever be on you, of whom ’tis said,Prostitute plague-struck, that you catch and kissInnocent lives to make them foully dead!
He sits. Upon the kingly head doth restThe round-balled wimple, and the heavy ringsTouch on the shoulders where the shadow clings.The downward garment shows the ambiguous breast;The face—that face one scarce can look on lestOne learn the secret of unspeakable things;But the dread gaze descends with shudderings,To the veiled couched knees, the hands and thumbs close-pressed.O lidded, downcast eyes that bear the weightOf all our woes and terrible wrong’s increase:Proud nostrils, lips proud-perfecter than these,With what a soul within you do you wait!Disdain and pity, love late-born of hate,Passion eternal, patience, pain and peace!
Where’er I go in this dense East,In sunshine or shade,I retch at the villainous feastThat England has made.
And my shame cannot understand,As scorn springs elate,How I ever loved that landThat now I hate!
In the dark waveless sea,Deep blue under deep blue,The fisher drifts by on the tideIn his small pole-balanced canoe.
Above him the cloud-clapped hillsCrown the dense jungly sweeps;The cocoa-nut groves hedge roundThe hut where the beach-wave sleeps.
Is it not better soTo be as this savage is,Than to live the wage-slave’s lifeOf hopeless agonies?
Aloll in the warm clear water,On her back with languorous limbs,She lies. The baby upon her breastsPaddles and falls and swims.
With half-closed eyes she smiles,Guarding it with her hands;And the sob swells up in my heart—In my heart that understands.
Dear,in the English country,The hatefullest land on earth,The mothers are starved and the children die,And death is better than birth!
I saw them as they were born,Erect and fearless and free,Facing the sun and the windOf the hills and the sea.
I saw them naked, superb,Like the Greeks long ago,With shield and spear and arrowReady to strike and throw.
I saw them as they were madeBy the Christianizing crows,Blinking, stupid, clumsyIn their greasy ill-cut clothes:
I heard their gibbering cant,And they sung those hymns that smellOf poor souls besotted, degradedWith the fear of “God” and “hell.”
And I thought if Jesus could see them,He who loved the freedom, the light,And loathed those who compassed heavenAnd earth for one proselyte,
To make him, etcetera, etcetera,—Then this sight, as on me or you,Would act on him like an emetic,And he’d have to go off and spue.
O Jesus, O man of the People,Who died to abolish all this—The pharisee rank and respectable,The scribe and the greedy priest—
O Jesus, O sacred Socialist,You would die again of shame,If you were alive and could seeWhat things are done in your name.
Dead in the sheep-pen he lies,Wrapped in an old brown sail.The smiling blue sea and the skiesKnow not sorrow nor wail.
Dragged up out of the hold,Dead on his last way home,Worn-out, wizened, a Chinee old,—O he is safe—at home!
Brother, I stand not as theseStaring upon you here.One of earth’s patient toilers at peaceI see, I revere!
In the warm cloudy night we goFrom the motionless ship;Our lanterns feebly glow;Our oars drop and drip.
We land on the thin pale beach,The coral isle’s round us;A glade of driven sand we reach;Our burial ground’s found us.
There we dig him a grave, jesting;We know not his name.What heeds he who is resting, resting?Would I were the same!
Come away, it is over and done!Peace and he shall not sever,By moonlight nor light of the sun,For ever and ever!
“Sleep in the pure driven sand,(No one will know)In the coral isle by the landWhere the blue tides come and go.
“Alive, thou wert poor, despised;Dead, thou canst haveWhat mightiest monarchs have prized,An eternal grave!
“Alone with the lovely isles,With the lovely deep,Where the sea-winds sing and the sunlight smilesThou liest asleep!”
Here to the parks they come,The scourings of the town,Like weary wounded animalsSeeking where to lie them down.
Brothers, let us take togetherAn easeful period.There is worse than to be as we are—Cast out, not of men but of God!
Bishop of Melbourne,who left Melbourne for the Bishopric of Manchester, 10thMarch1886.
He came, a stranger, and we gave him welcomeMore as loved friend than rumour’s honoured guest.He spoke! Were we, then, all so slack to listen?To hail him as our wisest, noblest, best?Why did he leave us?
He toiled! And we, we under such a leader,Forgot all other creeds, but that he taught,And proud of our clear answer to his summons,Forgot all other fights but that he fought!Why did he leave us?
He wearied! ’Twas too great, he said, the burden.We saw it and we cried with anxious love;“What does he (Let him back!) down in the battle?Is not the general’s place at rest above?”Why did he leave us?
He left us for a “wider sphere of labour!”A tinsel seat within a House that shakes,To herd with priests meal-mouthed, with lords and liarsThat still would bind a nation’s chain that breaks!Why did he leave us?
Farewell, then! Are there any to reproach youIn all this facile crowd that weeps and cheers?Not one! But, ah you yet shall listen sadlyTo an echo falling faint through the dead years:—Why did he leave us?
Yonder the band is playingAnd the fine young people walk.They are envying each other and talkingTheir pretty empty talk.
There, in the shade on the outskirts,Stretched on the grass, I seeA man with a slouch hat, smoking.That is the man for me!
That is the Man of the Nation;He works and much endures.When all the rest is rotten,He rises and cuts and cures.
He’s the soldier of the Crimea,Fighting to honour fools;He’s the grappler and strangler of LeeLord of the terrible tools.
He’s in all the conquered nationsThat have won their own at last,And in all that yet shall win it.And the world by him goes past!
O strong sly world, this namelessStill, much-enduring Man,Is the hand of God that shall clutch youFor all you have done, or can!
What? do you say that we, the toilers—the slaves—(Why strain at the gnat nameWho swallow the camel thing your pocket craves?)—That we are “just the same,”
(Nay, worse) when power is ours and wealth—that weAre harder masters still,More keen to ring her last from misery,More greedy of our will?
’Tis true! And when you see men so—seeusSneer at us, call us swine!—“How we must love you who have made us thus,You may perhaps divine!”
In that rich archipelago of seaWith fiery hills, thick woods wherein the mias[79a]Browses along the trees, and god-like menLeave monuments of speech too large for us,[79b]There are strange forest-trees. Far up, their rootsSpread from the central trunk, and settle downDeep in the life-fed earth, seventy feet below.In the past days here grew another tree,On whose high fork the parasitic seedFell and sprang up, and, finding life and strengthIn the disease, decrepitude and deathOf that it fed on, utterly consumed it,And stands the monument of Nature’s crime!So Labour with his parasites, the twoGreat swollen robbers, Land and Capital,Stands to the gaze of men but as a heapOf rotted dust whose only use must beTo rich the roots of the proud stem that killed it![80]
I see a land of desperate droughts and floods:I see a land where need keeps spreading round,And all but giants perish in the stress:I see a land where more, and more, and moreThe demons, Earth and Wealth, grow bloat and strong.
I see a land that lies a helpless preyTo wealthy cliques and gamblers and their slaves,The huckster politicians: a poor landThat less and less can make her heart-wish law.
Yea, but I see a land where some few braveRaise clear eyes to the Struggle that must come,Reaching firm hands to draw the doubters in,Preaching the gospel: “Drill and drill and drill!”Yea, but I see a land where best of allThe hope of victory burns strong and bright!
“Yes, let Art go, if it must beThat with it men must starve—If Music, Painting, PoetrySpring from the wasted hearth!”
Yes, let Art go, till once againThrough fearless heads and handsThe toil of millions and the painBe passed from out the lands:
Till from the few their plunder fallsTo those who’ve toiled and earnedBut misery’s hopeless intervalsFrom those who’ve robbed and spurned.
Yes, let Art go, without a fear,Like autumn flowers we burn,For, with her reawakening year,Be sure she will return!—
Return, but greater, nobler yetBecause her laurel crownWith dew and not with blood is wet,And as our queen sit down!
I came to buy a book. It was a shopDown in a narrow quiet street, and hereThey kept, I knew, these socialistic books.I entered. All was bare, but clean and neat.The shelves were ranged with unsold wares; the counterHeld a few sheets and papers. Here and thereHung prints and calendars. I rapped, and straightA young girl came out through the inner door.She had a clear and simple face; I sawShe had no beauty, loveliness, nor charm,But, as your eyes met those grey light-lit eyesLike to a mountain spring so pure, you thought:“He’d be a clever man who looked, and lied!”I asked her for the book. . . . We spoke a little. . . .Her words were as her face was, as her eyes.Yes, she’d read many books like this of mine:Also some poets, Shelley, Byron too,And Tennyson, but ‘poets only dreamed!’Thus, then, we talked, until by chance I spokeA phrase and then a name. ’Twas “Henry George.”Her face lit up. O it was beautiful,Or never woman’s face was! “Henry George?”She said. And then a look, a flush, a smile,Such as sprung up in Magdalenè’s cheekWhen some voice uttered Jesus, made her angel.She turned and pointed up the counter. I,Loosing mine eyes from that ensainted face,Looked also. ’Twas a print, a common print,The head and shoulders of some man. She said,Quite in a whisper: “That’s him,Henry George!”
Darling, that in this life of wrong and woe,The lovely woman-soul within you broodedAnd wept and loved and hated and pitied,And knew not what its helplessness could do,Its helplessness, its sheer bewilderment—That then those eyes should fall, those angel eyes,On one who’d brooded, wept, loved, hated, pitied,Even as you had, but therefrom had sprungA hope, a plan, a scheme to right this wrong,And make this woe less hateful to the sun—And that pure soul had found its Master thusTo listen to, remember, watch and love,And trust the dawn that rose up through the dark:O this was goodFor me to see, as for some weary hopelessLonger and toiler for “the Kingdom of Heaven”To stand some lifeless twilight hour, and hear,There in the dim-lit house of Lazarus,Mary who said: “Thus, thus, he looked, he spake,The Master!”—So to hear her rapturous words,And gaze upon her up-raised heavenly face!