University of Virginia Library

THE DEAD MARCH OF THE LIVING.

We are marching, we are marching
Under heavens all overarching
But all pitiless and dumb,
In the winter cold and numb
And in summer pinched and parching;
Though the sparrow gets its crumb,
With a little drop of water
And a kind and cosy quarter
From the frost;
While we are tost
By the stony hearted street
To and fro
In want and woe,
With the tramp of countless feet.
And we stay not,
For we may not
Loiter upon Eden's borders,
Though the weakly
Ones fall meekly
Down and still beneath us lie;
For we have our marching orders
Marching though we drop and die,
Marching on
Though health is gone
And the early light that shone
Sweetly for the opening page
Of our early pilgrimage—
Though the pleasure in our toil
(When we started)
Which is only sin and soil
For the brow
And bosom now,
Has departed.
Marching on
Though friends are gone,
And our eyes can hardly con
Still the lesson we must learn,
While our hands do rarely earn
Just the pittance,
That is quittance
For the shadow that with blight
Enters not the rich man's door,
Darkens not the marble floor,
And at last is all our light.
Marching on,
If hope is gone
In the rags we scarce may don
With our tired and trembling fingers,
And the feeble fluttering breath—
Woe to him who turns or lingers,
When to lag behind is death!
Marching on
And marching on
Through the devil's Babylon,
Marching hence and marching hither,
But alas! we know not whither,
Up and down
And to and fro
In the many-palaced Town
Which on us does only frown,
Weary dreary must we go
Without pity, without rest,
Homeless, sleepless, and unblest;
With no bread
Except the stone,
With no bed
But earth alone.
Ah, if we indeed might stop
For a space
In some soft place
And learn some of Nature's grace
(Not in gutter or the shop)
In the sunshine, though we dim it
With our squalor, that may drop—
But, save death, can find no limit!
Dives with his gold and starch,
With his linen clean and fine
And his wine
Wetting lips that never parch,
With his pampered hounds and kine
Rests and revels while we march
Under heavens that overarch
All with equal shade and shine.
Flung like flotsam of the wave
On the shore
Which denies it of the store
That might save,
And repels it as before
To the grave—
Yes, to the grave.
We are marching, marching on,
Hope and health and living gone—
If we live,
Though we are dead
And our bodies only tread
Now the streets that grudge us bread,
And can nought but curses give;
We are ghosts and fugitive,
Ghosts of women, ghosts of men,
Ghosts of children—dead and gone,
From the jail and sweater's den,
From the paupers' cattle-pen,
Marching on
And marching on
Through this heartless Babylon;
Dwarfed and stunted,
Hooted, hunted
By the State that feasts its robbers
And its jobbers,
While it starves us
Down and carves us
With the scalpel of its scorn,
And protection
Not affection—
Wretches that were best unborn,
In our helplessness forlorn.
We are marching, while we can,
As we may,
The child and man
On the same old weary way
In one ragged disarray,
With no plan
But a brief and ghostly span,
As the ghosts of yesterday,
Just to keep still marching on,
(Where the hopes of childhood ran
And the lights of childhood shone),
Marching on
And marching on.
Outcasts in great Babylon.