University of Virginia Library

Hell? She is in it, and these shapes she sees,
While crawling on, are hateful and accurst!
Light laughter of light lips, mad images
Of dainty creatures delicately nurst,
Cries of the revel, blackness, and the gleam
Of ghastly lights, are blended in her dream
Of Hell that lives and is, the Hell she knows,
With all its mockery of human woes!
Darkly, as in a glass, she seëth plain
The vision of dead days that live again:
The house, beyond these streets, where she was born;
The father's face in death; the hungry home;
The fight for bread; the hungry and forlorn
Cry for a help and guide that would not come;
The glimmer of glad halls, the forms therein
Beck'ning and laughing till she joined their mirth;
Then, pleasures sultry with the sense of sin,
And those foul dead sea fruits that taste of earth;
Then, blackness of disease and utter shame,
And all Hell's infamies without a name!
Then, all the bloom of sense and spirit fled,
The slow descent to midnight gulfs of dread
Like this she sees!—Then, in a wretched room
Deep 'mid the City's sunless heart of gloom,
Another life awakening 'neath her heart,
A sickly babe with crying lips apart
Moaning for food!—and into Hell she creeps
Once more to feed it, haunting the black street,—
Yea, in the garret where her infant sleeps
Hell's hideous rites are done, that it may eat!
Then, Death once more! The sickly life at rest;
The child's light coffin that a child might bear;
The mother's hunger tearing at her breast,
And only Drink to drown the soul's despair.
She sees it all, on this her Jubilee,
While the Night moans and the sick
Hell-lights gleam. . . .
O God! O Motherhood! Can these things be,
And men still say that Hell is but a dream?