 | Poems Real and Ideal |  |
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VII. WILLIAM GOULDSTONE.
The man “sees red”. A man who slays wholesale—Makes his own hearthstone run with dripping gore,
And, having killed three children, seeks for more
To slaughter, doing a deed which turneth pale
E'en Love and Mercy 'neath the eternal veil
Of cloud whence white-winged pity and healing soar;
A man who brings the ravage of red war
Into his peaceful home, and then can hail
His own fierce-eyed intolerable deed
As a deliverance from his pressing woe;
The man who, when his own five children bleed
Before him, thinks that he has holpen so
Their mother:—if thou hang “till he be dead”
This madman, England—then thine eyes “see red!”
Sept. 20, 1883.
| Poems Real and Ideal | |