The Poems of Richard Watson Gilder

In a little theater, in the Jewry of the New World, I sat among the sad-eyed exiles;
Narrow was the stage and meagerly appointed, and the players gave themselves up utterly to their art;
And, before our eyes, were enacted scenes of a play that scarcely seemed a play.

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The place was a city in a wide, unhappy land;
Even in that empire which drifts to-day like a great ship toward a black and unknown coast;
While men, with blanched faces, cry out: “Unless the tempest abates quickly, behold the mightiest wreck on all the shores of time!”
And the time of the drama was our own time; and the coming and the going; and the people themselves were of our own day and generation;
The people, with strange beards, and look of the immemorial Orient; like those men and women who, alien and melancholy, plod the New-World streets;
Like those who, in slow and pitiful procession, on a fixed day of mourning, with dirges and wailings, poured innumerous into the city's open places;
And, as the play went on, at times the very speech of the actors, in hot debate, crackled and sputtered like the fuse of a Russian bomb.
And there an old man, the preacher of a hunted race and a despised religion, all alone called to his people to follow him, and their God, the God of Israel.
Passionately he proclaimed the faith of the fathers and the saving word and protecting arm of the Almighty;
He, the voice and the prophet of the Lord High God, called aloud to them who strayed:—
“Come ye back to your God, and to His Everlasting Word.
“Ye young men who have forgotten Him, the Unforgetting, and ye old men mumbling your prayers; ye cowards! leaving the holy shrine unprotected”;
And the young men answered and called the old man the name of them who are dead and have passed away;
And the old men, unheeding, swayed to and fro, mumbling their ancient psalms and ineffectual supplications.
Then, while the noise of the beastly rabble swelled

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louder and nearer—then did the preacher turn once more to the Lord of Hosts, lifting up his voice in praise and prayer, and faith unquenchable;
Crying to God with a loud voice and saying:—“Lead me, Thou Jehovah! in the right way,
“For now hath come the great day of the Lord; now, Lord, save Thy people and bless Thy heritage,
“Thou who wert, and art, and ever shalt be! Show now Thy Almightiness, send Thy miracle as lightning from on high.”
Nearer and nearer came the curses and shrieks and the wailing lamentations; and men and women fled, wounded, before the infamous and infuriate avengers;
Then the crash of guns and the terror of carnage and rapine unspeakable;
And, in the midst, the voice of an old man crying to heaven, and falling smitten and dead before the shrine of the God of Israel.
And, listening, I heard not only the sounds of the mimic drama—but, louder and more dreadful, the panting of miserable women who welcomed death, the deliverer;
And from Kishineff and Odessa I heard, once more crying to heaven, the outpoured blood of the Jew.

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And still as I listened and dreamed, the crimson flood widened to a great and lustrous pool,
And looking therein I saw reflected the faces of many known well to my heart and to the hearts of all the world,
For there were the features of mighty warriors and makers of laws and leaders of men; of poets inspired and of painters and musicians; and of famed philosophers, and of men and women who loved, and labored for, their kind;

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And the faces of preachers and prophets; of those who fervently cursed the unrighteous, and who to a world in darkness brought light everlasting;
And chief of all I saw in that crimson mirror the face of him whose spirit was bowed beneath the agonies of all mankind.

University of Virginia Library

A TRAGEDY OF TO-DAY

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