Women must weep :: :: University of Virginia Library

Turn'd from the sick thou would'st not greet,
Only because they are poor—
Only because they are poor;
And yet that his fellows should lack and live,
Is a crime the rich cannot forgive,
Set alone in his castled moor,
Looking down on the pinch'd and poor:
While he smiles at the wealthy friends that err,
At the titled thief and adulterer.

Famish'd and faint they pine,
Under shadow of Cross and Crown,
Broken, and yet thou mak'st no sign,
Brother, though these are thine;
Only because they are down,
Only because they are down;
And is it a sin in this Christian land,
That a fallen wretch should raise his hand
For help from a Christian town,
When no fault has thrust him down?
And the villains, who still their thonsands slay,
Go honour'd and own'd their guilty way.

Look, where the secret knife
On the quivering flesh has carved
Such a ghastly tale of want and strife,
As the fingers sew with the thread of life,
Only because they are starved—
Only because they are starved;
While they slave and slave with the dwindling might,
Through the helpless pain of the hopeless night,
Which a brother might have halved,
When he heard the moaning starved;
For a farthing or two an hour they slave,
Till they drop despised in a pauper's grave.

All in misery mute they lie,
In the darkness blind and bleak;
For they cannot rend the accursed tie,
And they have no rest except to die,

Only because they are weak—
Only because they are weak;
And they munch the crust from the gutter's dirt,
While they drudge at the button-hole or shirt—
That is shroud, if it could speak—
As they daily grow more weak;
And their sisters sing, at their fortune's flood,
Who dance in the dresses wrought with blood.

Thousands and thousands they are,
Shut out in the shameful cold,
And prison'd behind the awful bar
That never lets in the light of star,
Only because they are sold—
Only because they are sold
To the vampires for whom they bleed and ply,
Who disown when they have drain'd them dry,
And have turn'd them into gold
Ruin'd, and bought and sold—
Who have wrung their twenty-two per cent,
From the blasted lives of the spoiled and spent.

Thou, with the pictured wall,
In the shelter, shy and hush'd,
Dost thou heed not yet the hungry call
Of the ghostly crowds that fail and fall,
Only because they are crushed—
Only because they are crushed
By the grinding wheels of the idol Wealth,
That spares none though it devours in stealth,
And with streaming tears is flush'd
Of the victims hourly crushed?
Dost thou heed not yet the accusing sigh,
That goes up to the judgment throne on high?

On those cheeks that sickness soils,
The roses of youth have bloomed,
If decay now draws its blighting coils
Round the weary face that dimly toils,
Only because they are doomed—
Only because they are doomed,

And mark'd as a tree that trembling stands,
Which the woodman for destruction brands,
In a forest grey and gloom'd,
That is desolate and doom'd;
For the sufferers of contempt or hate,
Are the innocent and unfortunate.

In the Devil's weekly bill,
With its hecatombs to lust,
We read the record and end of Ill,
That gets bigger and blacker, and rises still,
Ouly because they are dust—
Only because they are dust
For the sepulchre, but we search in vain
For the bitter curse that left them slain,
As its prey it ever must,
When they have no food but dust;
While they eat their hearts in the hideous fast,
Till the kindlier worms consume at last.

Women and children and men
Dying—and who will know?—
Huddled as beasts in a slaughter-pen,
That were free for the stroke of the statesman's pen,
Only because they are low—
Only because they are low;
Unpaid, ere they sink as the others sank,
And they leave behind not a trace or blank,
In the laughing ebb and flow,
Like the unseen bubbles low;
They are dying, and, till the tide is gone,
We toy with our trifles and yet live on.