University of Virginia Library

I
TO A LADY

II
THE TURK IN ARMENIA

What profits it, O England, to prevail
In arts and arms, and mighty realms subdue,
And ocean with thine argosies bestrew,
And wrest thy tribute from each golden gale,
If idly thou must hearken to the wail
Of women martyred by the turbaned crew
Whose tenderest mercy was the sword that slew,
And hazard not the dinting of thy mail?
We deemed of old thou held'st a charge from Him
Who sits companioned by His seraphim,
To smite the wronger with thy destined rod.
Wait'st thou His sign? Enough, the unanswered cry
Of virgin souls for vengeance, and on high
The gathering blackness of the frown of God!

III
IGNOBLE EASE

Never henceforth, O England, nevermore
Prate thou of generous effort, righteous aim,
Whose shame is that thou knowest not thy shame!
Summer hath passed, and Autumn's threshing-floor
Been winnowed; Winter at Armenia's door
Snarls like a wolf; and still the sword and flame
Sleep not; thou only sleepest; and the same
Cry unto heaven ascends as heretofore;
And the red stream thou might'st have staunched, yet runs:
And roused by no divinely beckoning Wraith,
Stirred by no clarion blowing loud and wide,
Lost in ignoble ease, behold thy sons,
Sitting among the shards of broken faith,
And by the ruins of forgotten pride.

IV
THE PRICE OF PRESTIGE

You in high places; you that drive the steeds
Of Empire; you that say unto our hosts,
“Go thither,” and they go; and from our coasts
Bid sail the squadrons, and they sail, their deeds
Shaking the world: lo! from a land that pleads
For mercy where no mercy is, the ghosts
Look in upon you faltering at your posts—
Upbraid you parleying while a People bleeds
To death. What stays the thunder in your hand?
A fear for England? Can her pillared fame
Only on faith forsworn securely stand,
On faith forsworn that murders babes and men?
Are such the terms of Glory's tenure? Then
Fall her accursed greatness, in God's name!

V
HOW LONG?

Heaped in their ghastly graves they lie, the breeze
Sickening o'er fields where others vainly wait
For burial: and the butchers keep high state
In silken palaces of perfumed ease.
The panther of the desert, matched with these,
Is pitiful; beside their lust and hate,
Fire and the plague-wind are compassionate,
And soft the fang'd lips of the ravening seas.
How long shall they be borne? Is not the cup
Of crime yet full? Doth devildom still lack
Some consummating crown, that we hold back
The scourge, and in Christ's borders give them room?
How long shall they be borne, O England? Up,
Tempest of God, and sweep them to their doom!

VI
REPUDIATED RESPONSIBILITY

I had not thought to hear it voiced so plain,
Uttered so forthright, on their lips who steer
This nation's course: I had not thought to hear
That word re-echoed by an English thane,
Guilt's maiden-speech when first a man lay slain,
“Am I my brother's keeper?” Yet full near
It sounded, and the syllables rang clear
As the immortal rhetoric of Cain.
“Wherefore should we, sirs, more than they—or they—
Unto these helpless reach a hand to save?”
An English thane, in this our English air,
Speaking for England? Then indeed her day
Slopes to its twilight, and, for Honour, there
Is needed but a requiem, and a grave.

VII
A HURRIED FUNERAL

A little deeper, sexton. You forget,
She you would bury 'neath so thin a crust
Of loam, was fiery-souled, and ev'n in dust
She may lie restless, she may toss and fret,
Nay, she might break a seal too lightly set,
And vex, unmannerly, our ease! She must
Beneath no lack of English earth lie thrust,
Would we unhaunted sleep! Nay, deeper yet.
Quick, friend, the cortège comes. There—that will serve;
Deep enough now; and thou'lt need all thy nerve,
If, in her coffin, at the last, amid
The mourners in the customary suits,
And to the scandal of these decent mutes,
This corpse of England's Honour burst the lid!

VIII
ENGLAND TO AMERICA

O towering daughter, Titan of the West,
Behind a thousand leagues of foam secure;
Thou toward whom our inmost heart is pure
Of ill intent: although thou threatenest
With most unfilial hand thy mother's breast,
Not for one breathing-space may Earth endure
The thought of War's intolerable cure
For such vague pains as vex to-day thy rest!
But if thou hast more strength than thou canst spend
In tasks of Peace, and find'st her yoke too tame,
Help us to smite the cruel, to befriend
The succourless, and put the false to shame.
So shall the ages laud thee, and thy name
Be lovely among nations to the end.

IX
A BIRTHDAY

It is the birthday of the Prince of Peace:
Full long ago He lay with steeds in stall,
And universal Nature knew through all
Her borders that the reign of Pan must cease.
The fatness of the land, the earth's increase,
Cumbers the board; the holly hangs in hall;
Somewhat of her abundance Wealth lets fall;
It is the birthday of the Prince of Peace.
The dead rot by the wayside; the unblest
Who live, in caves and desert mountains lurk
Trembling, His foldless flock, shorn of their fleece.
Women in travail, babes that suck the breast,
Are spared not. Famine hurries to her work.
It is the birthday of the Prince of Peace.

X
THE TIRED LION

Speak once again, with that great note of thine,
Hero withdrawn from Senates and their sound
Unto thy home by Cambria's northern bound,
Speak once again, and wake a world supine.
Not always, not in all things, was it mine
To follow where thou led'st: but who hath found
Another man so shod with fire, so crowned
With thunder, and so armed with wrath divine?
Lift up thy voice once more! The nation's heart
Is cold as Anatolia's mountain snows.
Oh, from these alien paths of base repose
Call back thy England, ere thou too depart—
Ere, on some secret mission, thou too start
With silent footsteps, whither no man knows.

XI
THE BARD-IN-WAITING

Treachery's apologist, whose numbers rung,
But yesterday, remonstrant in my ear;
Thou to whom England seems a mistress dear,
Insatiable of honey from thy tongue:
Because I crouch not fawning slaves among,
How is my service proved the less sincere?
Have not I also deemed her without peer?
Her beauty have not I too seen and sung?
But for the love I bore her lofty ways,
What were to me her stumblings and her slips?
And lovely is she still, her maiden lips
Pressed to the lips whose foam around her plays!
But on her brow's benignant star whose rays
Lit them that sat in darkness, lo! the eclipse.

XII
LEISURED JUSTICE

“She bides her hour.” And must I then believe
That when the day of peril is o'erpast,
She who was great because so oft she cast
All thought of peril to the waves that heave
Against her feet, shall greatly undeceive
Her purblind son who dreamed she shrank aghast
From Duty's signal, and shall act at last,
When there is naught remaining to retrieve?
At last! when the last altar is defiled,
And there are no more maidens to deflower—
When the last mother folds with famished arms
To her dead bosom her last butchered child—
Then shall our England, throned beyond alarms,
Rise in her might! Till then, “she bides her hour.”

XIII
THE PLAGUE OF APATHY

The dewfall of compassion, is it o'er
So soon? So soon is dead indifference come?
From wintry sea to sea the land lies numb.
With palsy of the spirit stricken sore,
The land lies numb from iron shore to shore.
The unconcerned, they flourish: loud are some,
And without shame. The multitude stand dumb.
The England that we vaunted is no more.
Only the witling's sneer, the worldling's smile,
The weakling's tremors, fail him not who fain
Would rouse to noble deed. And all the while,
A homeless people, in their mortal pain,
Toward one far and famous ocean isle
Stretch hands of prayer, and stretch those hands in vain.

XIV
THE KNELL OF CHIVALRY

O vanished morn of crimson and of gold,
O youth of roselight and romance, wherein
I read of paynim and of paladin,
And Beauty snatched from ogre's dungeoned hold!
Ever the recreant would in dust be rolled,
Ever the true knight in the joust would win,
Ever the scaly shape of monstrous Sin
At last lie vanquished, fold on writhing fold.
Was it all false, that world of princely deeds,
The splendid quest, the good fight ringing clear?
Yonder the Dragon ramps with fiery gorge,
Yonder the victim faints and gasps and bleeds;
But in his merry England our St. George
Sleeps a base sleep beside his idle spear.

XV
TO RUSSIA

XVI
A TRIAL OF ORTHODOXY

The clinging children at their mother's knee
Slain; and the sire and kindred one by one
Flayed or hewn piecemeal; and things nameless done,
Not to be told: while imperturbably
The nations gaze, where Rhine unto the sea,
Where Seine and Danube, Thames and Tiber run,
And where great armies glitter in the sun,
And great kings rule, and man is boasted free!
What wonder if yon torn and naked throng
Should doubt a Heaven that seems to wink and nod,
And having moaned at noontide, “Lord, how long?”
Should cry, “Where hidest Thou?” at evenfall,
At midnight, “Is He deaf and blind, our God?”
And ere day dawn, “Is He indeed at all?”

XVII
“IF”

Yea, if ye could not, though ye would, lift hand—
Ye halting leaders—to abridge Hell's reign;
If, for some cause ye may not yet make plain,
Yearning to strike, ye stood as one may stand
Who in a nightmare sees a murder planned
And hurrying to its issue, and though fain
To stay the knife, and fearless, must remain
Madly inert, held fast by ghostly band;—
If such your plight, most hapless ye of men!
But if ye could and would not, oh, what plea,
Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when
The thunder-cloud of witnesses shall loom,
With Ravished Childhood on the seat of doom,
At the Assizes of Eternity?

XVIII
A WONDROUS LIKENESS

Still, on Life's loom, the infernal warp and weft
Woven each hour! Still, in august renown,
A great realm watching, under God's great frown!
Ever the same! The little children cleft
In twain: the little tender maidens reft
Of maidenhood! And through a little town
A stranger journeying, wrote this record down,
“In all the place there was not one man left.”
O friend, the sudden lightning of whose pen
Makes Horror's countenance visible afar,
And Desolation's face familiar,
I think this very England of my ken
Is wondrous like that little town, where are
In all the streets and houses no more men.

XIX
STARVING ARMENIA

Open your hearts, ye clothed from head to feet,
Ye housed and whole, who listen to the cry
Of them that not yet slain and mangled lie,
Only despoiled of all that made life sweet—
Only left bare to snow, and wind, and sleet,
And roofless to the inhospitable sky.
Give them of your abundance, lest they die,
And famine make this mighty woe complete;
And lest—if truly, as your creeds aver,
A day of reckoning come—it be your lot
To hear the voice of the uprisen dead:
“We were the naked whom ye covered not,
The sick to whom ye did not minister,
Yea, and the hungry whom ye gave not bread.”

XX
TO THE SULTAN

Caliph, I did thee wrong. I hailed thee late
“Abdul the Damned,” and would recall my word.
It merged thee with the unillustrious herd
Who crowd the approaches to the infernal gate—
Spirits gregarious, equal in their state
As is the innumerable ocean bird,
Gannet or gull, whose wandering plaint is heard
On Ailsa or Iona desolate.
For, in a world where cruel deeds abound,
The merely damned are legion: with such souls
Is not each hollow and cranny of Tophet crammed?
Thou with the brightest of Hell's aureoles
Dost shine supreme, incomparably crowned,
Immortally, beyond all mortals, damned.

XXI
ON THE REPORTED EXPULSION OF AHMED RIZA BY THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT

When, from supreme disaster, France uprose,
Shook her great wings and faced the world anew,
Who, if not we, rejoiced at heart to view
Her proud resilience after mightiest woes?
When 'neath the anarch's knife we saw the close
Of Carnot's day, amid her weepings who
Wept if not we, for the just man and true
That masked his strength in most urbane repose?
And now again we mourn, but not with her,
Nay, not with her, though for her!—mourn to see
A tyrant, Hell's most perfect minister,
A man-fiend, sun him in her countenance;
And Freedom, whose impassioned name was France,
Lie soiled and desecrate by France the Free.

XXII
ON A CERTAIN EUROPEAN ALLIANCE

XXIII
TO OUR SOVEREIGN LADY

Queen, that from Spring to Autumn of Thy reign
Hast taught Thy people how 'tis queenlier far
Than any golden pomp of peace or war,
Simply to be a woman without stain!
Queen whom we love, Who lovest us again!
We pray that yonder, by Thy wild Braemar,
The lord of many legions, the White Czar,
At this red hour, hath tarried not in vain.
We dream that from Thy words, perhaps Thy tears,
Ev'n in the King's inscrutable heart, shall grow
Harvest of succour, weal, and gentler days!
So shall Thy lofty name to latest years
Still loftier sound, and ever sweetlier blow
The rose of Thy imperishable praise.

XXIV
THE AWAKENING

XXV
HOW WEARY IS OUR HEART

XXVI
EUROPE AT THE PLAY