Poems Real and Ideal :: :: University of Virginia Library

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.

This unfortunate man, in a fit of homicidal frenzy, killed three of his children, and violently attacked and injured the remaining two. His life was subsequently spared on the ground of insanity.