PROEM.

"OUTSIDE LONDON."

In the black night, along the mud-deep roads,

Amid the threatening boughs and ghastly streams,

Hark! sounds that gird the darknesses like goads,

Murmurs and rumours and reverberant dreams,

Tramplings, breaths, movements, and a little light.—

The marching of the Army of the Night!

The stricken men, the mad brute-beasts are keeping

No more their places in the ditches or holes,

But rise and join us, and the women, weeping

Beside the roadways, rise like demon-souls.

Fill up the ranks! What shimmers there so bright?

The bayonets of the Army of the Night!

Fill up the ranks! We march in steadfast column,

In wavering lines yet forming more and more;

Men, women, children, sombre, silent, solemn,

Rank follows rank like billows to the shore.

Dawnwards we tramp, towards the day and light.

On, on and up, the Army of the Night!

I.

"ENGLAND."

IN THE CAMP.

This is a leader’s tent. "Who gathers here?"

Enter and see and listen. On the ground

Men sit or stand, enter or disappear,

Dark faces and deep voices all around.

One answers you. "You ask who gathers here?

Companions! Generals we have none, nor chief.

What need is there? The plan is all so clear—

The future’s hope, the present’s grim relief!

"Food for us all, and clothes, and roofs come first.

The means to gain them? This, our leaguered band!

The hatred of the robber rich accursed

Keeps foes together, makes fools understand.

"Beyond the present’s faith, the future’s hope

Points to the dawning hour when all shall be

But one. The man condemned shall fit the rope

Around the hangman’s neck, and both be free!

"The sun then rises on a happier land

Where Wealth and Labour sound but as one word.

We drill, we train, we arm our leaguered band.

What is there more to tell you have not heard?"

This is a leader’s tent. They gather here,

Resolute, stern, menacing. On the ground

They sit or stand, enter or disappear,

Dark faces and deep voices all around.

"AXIOM."

Let him who toils, enjoy

Fruit of his toiling.

Let him whom sweats annoy,

No more be spoiling.

For we would have it be

That, weak or stronger,

Not he who works, but he

Who works not, hunger!

DRILL.

When day’s hard task’s done,

Eve’s scant meal partaken,

Out we steal each one,

Weariless, unshaken.

In small reeking squares,

Garbaged plots, we gather,

Little knots and pairs,

Brother, sister, father.

Then the word is given.

In their silent places

Under lowering heaven,

Range our stern-set faces.

Now we march and wheel

In our clumsy line,

Shouldering sticks for steel,

Thoughts like bitter brine!

Drill, drill, drill, and drill!

It is only thus

Conquer yet we will

Those who’ve conquered us.

Patience, sisters, mothers!

We must not forget

Dear dead fathers, brothers;

They must teach us yet.

In that hour we see,

The hour of our desire,

What shall their slayers be?

As the stubble to the fire!

EVENING HYMN IN THE HOVELS.

"We sow the fertile seed and then we reap it;

We thresh the golden grain; we knead the bread.

Others that eat are glad. In store they keep it,

While we hunger outside with hearts like lead.

Hallelujah!

"We hew the stone and saw it, rear the city.

Others inhabit there in pleasant ease.

We have no thing to ask of them save pity,

No answer they to give but what they please.

Hallelujah!

"Is it for ever, fathers, say, and mothers,

That we must toil and never know the light?

Is it for ever, sisters, say, and brothers,

That they must grind us dead here in the night?

Hallelujah!

"O we who sow, reap, knead, shall we not also

Have strength and pleasure of the food we make?

O we who hew, build, deck, shall we not also

The happiness that we have given partake?

Hallelujah!"

IN THE STREET.

LORD ----.

You have done well, we say it. You are dead,

And, of the man that with the right hand takes

Less than the left hand gives, let it be said

He has done something for our wretched sakes.

For those to whom you gave their daily bread

Rancid with God-loathed "charity," their drink

Putrid with man-loathed "sin," we bow our head

Grateful, as the great hearse goes by, and think.

Yes, you have fed the flesh and starved the soul

Of thousands of us; you have taught too well

The rich are little gods beyond control,

Save of your big God of the heaven and hell.

We thank you. This was pretty once, and right.

Now it wears rather thin. My lord, good night!

"LIBERTY!"

"Liberty!" Is that the cry, then?

We have heard it oft of yore.

Once it had, we think, a meaning;

Let us hear it now no more.

We have read what history tells us

Of its heroes, martyrs too.

Doubtless they were very splendid,

But they’re not for me and you.

There were Greeks who fought and perished,

Won from Persians deathless graves.

Had we lived then, we’re aware that

We’d have been those same Greeks’ slaves!

Then a Roman came who loved us;

Cæsar gave men tongues and swords.

Crying "Liberty," they fought him,

Cato and his cut-throat lords.

When he’d give a broader franchise,

Lift the mangled nations bowed,

Crying "Liberty!" they killed him,

Brutus and his pandar crowd.

We have read what history tells us,

O the truthful memory clings!

Tacitus, the chartered liar,

Gloating over poisoned kings!

"Liberty!" The stale cry echoes

Past snug homesteads, tinsel thrones,

Over smoking fields and hovels,

Murdered peasants’ bleaching bones.

That’s the cry that mocked us madly,

Toiling in our living graves,

When hell-mines sent up the chorus:

"Britons never shall be slaves!"

"Liberty!" We care not for it!

What we care for’s food, clothes, homes,

For our dear ones toiling, waiting

For the time that never comes!

IN THE EDGWARE ROAD.

(To LORD L----.)

Will you not buy? She asks you, my lord, you

Who know the points desirable in such.

She does not say that she is perfect. True,

She’s not too pleasant to the sight or touch.

But then—neither are you!

Her cheeks are rather fallen in; a mist

Glazes her eyes, for all their hungry glare.

Her lips do not breathe balmy when they’re kissed.

And yet she’s not more loathsome than, I swear,

Your grandmother at whist.

My lord, she will admit, and need not frame

Excuses for herself, that she’s not chaste.

First a young lover had her; then she came

From one man’s to another’s arms, with haste.

Your mother did the same.

Moreover, since she’s married, once or twice

She’s sold herself for certain things at night,

To sell one’s body for the highest price

Of social ease and power, all girls think right.

Your sister did it thrice.

What, you’ll not buy? You’ll curse at her instead?—

Her children are alone, at home, quite near.

These winter streets, so gay at nights, ’tis said,

Have ’ticed the wanton out. She could not hear

Her children cry for bread!

TO THE GIRLS OF THE UNIONS.

Girls, we love you, and love

Asks you to give again

That which draws it above,

Beautiful, without stain.

Give us weariless faith

In our Cause pure, passionate,

Dearer than life and death,

Dear as the love that’s it!

Give to the man who turns

Traitrous hands or forlorn

Back from the plough that burns,

Give him pitiless scorn!

Let him know that no wife

Would bear him a fearless child

To hate and loathe the life

Of a leprous father defiled.

Girls, we love you, and love

Asks you to give again

That which draws it above,

Beautiful, without stain!

HAGAR.

She went along the road,

Her baby in her arms.

The night and its alarms

Made deadlier her load.

Her shrunken breasts were dry;

She felt the hunger bite.

She lay down in the night,

She and the child, to die.

But it would wail, and wail,

And wail. She crept away.

She had no word to say,

Yet still she heard the wail.

She took a jaggèd stone;

She wished it to be dead.

She beat it on the head;

It only gave one moan.

She has no word to say;

She sits there in the night.

The east sky glints with light,

And it is Christmas Day!

"WHY!"

"Why is it we toil so?

Where go all the gains?

What do we produce for it,

All our pangs and pains?"

Why it is we toil so,

Is it because, like sheep,

Since our fathers sought the shears,

We the same course keep.

Where go all the gains? Well,

It must be confessed,

First the landlords take the rent,

And the masters take the rest.

What do we produce for it?

Gentlemen!—and then

Imitation snobs who’d be

Like the gentlemen!

"What, is it for such as these

That we suffer thus?

Fuddle-brained and vicious fools,

Vermin venomous?

"What, is that why on the top

Creeps that Royal Louse,

The prince of pheasants and cigars,

Of ballet-girls and grouse?"

Yes, that’s why, my Christian friends,

They slave and slaughter us.

England is made a dunghill that

Some bugs may breed and buzz.

A VISITOR IN THE CAMP.

To Mary Robinson.

"What, are you lost, my pretty little lady?

This is no place for such sweet things as you.

Our bodies, rank with sweat, will make you sicken,

And, you’ll observe, our lives are rank lives too."

"Oh no, I am not lost! Oh no, I’ve come here

(And I have brought my lute, see, in my hand),

To see you, and to sing of all you suffer

To the great world, and make it understand!"

"Well, say! If one of those who’d robbed you thousands,

Dropped you a sixpence in the gutter where

You lay and rotted, would you call her angel,

For all her charming smile and dainty air?"

"Oh no, I come not thus! Oh no, I’ve come here

With heart indignant, pity like a flame,

To try and help you!"—"Pretty little lady,

It will be best you go back whence you came."

"‘Enthusiasms’ we have such little time for!

In our rude camp we drill the whole day long.

When we return from out the serried battle,

Come, and we’ll listen to your pretty song!"

"LORD LEITRIM."

My Lord, at last you have it! Now we know

Truth’s not a phrase, justice an idle show.

Your life ran red with murder, green with lust.

Blood has washed blood clean, and, in the final dust

Your carrion will be purified. Yet, see,

Though your body perish, for your soul shall be

An immortality of infamy!

"ANARCHISM."

’Tis not when I am here,

In these homeless homes,

Where sin and shame and disease

And foul death comes;

’Tis not when heart and brain

Would be still and forget

Men and women and children

Dragged down to the pit:

But when I hear them declaiming

Of "liberty," "order," and "law,"

The husk-hearted gentleman

And the mud-hearted bourgeois,

That a sombre hateful desire

Burns up slow in my breast

To wreck the great guilty temple,

And give us rest!

BELGRAVIA BY NIGHT.

"Move On!"

"The foxes have holes,

And the birds of the air have nests,

But where shall the heads of the sons of men

Be laid, be laid?"

"Where the cold corpse rests,

Where the sightless moles

Burrow and yet cannot make it afraid,

Rout but cannot wake it again,

There shall the heads of the sons of men

Be laid, laid!"

JESUS.

Where is poor Jesus gone?

He sits with Dives now,

And not even the crumbs are flung

To Lazarus below.

Where is poor Jesus gone?

Is he with Magdalen?

He doles her one by one

Her wages of shame!

Where is poor Jesus gone?

The good Samaritan,

What does he there alone?

He stabs the wounded man!

Where is poor Jesus gone,

The lamb they sacrificed?

They’ve made God of his carrion

And labelled it "Christ!"

PARALLELS FOR THE PIOUS.

"He holds a pistol to my head,

Swearing that he will shoot me dead,

If he have not my purse instead,

The robber!"

"He, with the lash of wealth and power,

Flogs out my heart and flings the dower,

The plundered pittance of his hour,

The robber!"

"He shakes his serpent tongue that lies,

Wins trust for poisoned sophistries

And stabs me in the dark, and flies,

The assassin!"

"He pits me in the dreadful fight

Against my fellow. Then he quite

Strips both his victims in the night,

The assassin!"

"PRAYER."

This is what I pray

In this horrible day,

In this terrible night,

God will give me light.

Such as I have had,

That I go not mad.

This is what I seek,

God will keep me meek

Till mine eyes behold,

Till my lips have told

All this hellish crime.—

Then it’s sleeping time!

TO THE CHRISTIANS.

Take, then, your paltry Christ,

Your gentleman God.

We want the carpenter’s son,

With his saw and hod.

We want the man who loved

The poor and oppressed,

Who hated the rich man and king

And the scribe and the priest.

We want the Galilean

Who knew cross and rod.

It’s your "good taste" that prefers

A bastard God!

"DEFEAT?"

Who is it speaks of defeat?—

I tell you a Cause like ours

Is greater than defeat can know;

It is the power of powers!

As surely as the earth rolls round,

As surely as the glorious sun

Brings the great world sea-wave,

Must our Cause be won!

What is defeat to us?—

Learn what a skirmish tells,

While the great Army marches on

To storm earth’s hells!

TO JOHN RUSKIN.

(After reading his "Modern Painters.")

Yes, you do well to mock us, you

Who knew our bitter woe—

To jeer the false, deny the true

In us blind struggling low,

While, on your pleasant place aloft

With flowers and clouds and streams,

At our black sweat and toil you scoffed

That marred your idle dreams.

"Oh, freedom, what was that to us,"

(You’d shout down to us there),

"Except the freedom foul, vicious,

From all of good and fair?

"Obedience, faith, humility,

To us were empty names."—

The like to you (might we reply)

Whose noisy life proclaims

Presumption, want of human love,

Impatience, filthy breath, [32]

The snob in soul who looks above,

Trampling on what’s beneath.

When did you strive, in nobler part,

With love and gentleness,

To help one soul, to win one heart

To joy and hope and peace?

Go to, vain prophet, without faith

In God who maketh new,

With hankerings for this putrid death,

This Flesh-feast of the Few,

This Social Structure of red mud,

This Edifice of slime,

Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar’s blood,

Whose pinnacle is Crime!—

Go to, for we who strain our power

For light and warmth and scope,

For wives’, for children’s happier hour,

Can teach you faith and hope.

Hark to the shout of those who cleared

The Missionary Ridge!

Look on those dead who never feared

The battle’s bloody bridge!

Watch the stern swarm at that last breach

March up that came not thence—

And learn Democracy can teach

Divine obedience. [33]

Pass through that South at last brought low

Where loyal freemen live,

And learn Democracy knows how

To utterly forgive.

Come then, and take this free-given bread

Of us who’ve scarce enough;

Hush your proud lips, bow down your head

And worship human love!

TO THE EMPEROR WILLIAM.

You are at least a man, of men a king.

You have a heart, and with that heart you love.

The race you come from is not gendered of

The filthy sty whose latest litter cling

Round England’s flesh-pots, gorged and gluttoning.

No, but on flaming battle-fields, in courts

Of honour and of danger old resorts,

The name of Hohen-Zollern clear doth ring.

O Father William, you, not falsely weak,

Who never spared the rod to spoil the child,

Our mighty Germany, we only speak

To bless you with a blessing sweet and mild,

Ere that near heaven your weary footsteps seek

Where love with liberty is reconciled.

SONG OF THE DISPOSSESSED.

"to jesus."

"Be with us by day, by night,

O lover, O friend;

Hold before us thy light

Unto the end!

"See, all these children of ours

Starved and ill-clad.

Speak to thy heart’s lily-flowers,

And make them glad!

"Our wives and daughters are here,

Knowing wrong and shame’s touch

Bid them be of good cheer

Who have lovèd much.

"And we, we are robbed and oppressed,

Even as thine were.

Tell us of comfort and rest,

Banish despair!

"Be with us by day, by night,

O lover, O friend;

Hold before us thy light

Unto the end!"

ART.

Yes, let Art go, if it must be

That with it men must starve—

If Music, Painting, Poetry

Spring from the wasted hearth.

Pluck out the flower, however fair,

Whose beauty cannot bloom,

(However sweet it be, or rare)

Save from a noisome tomb.

These social manners, charm and ease,

Are hideous to who knows

The degradation, the disease

From which their beauty flows.

So, Poet, must thy singing be;

O Painter, so thy scene;

Musician, so thy melody,

While misery is queen.

Nay, brothers, sing us battle-songs

With clear and ringing rhyme;

Nay, show the world its hateful wrongs,

And bring the better time!

THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT. [35]

Thro’ the mists of years,

Thro’ the lies of men,

Your bloody sweat and tears,

Your desperate hopes and fears

Reach us once again.

Brothers, who long ago,

For life’s bitter sake

Toiled and suffered so,

Robbery, insult, blow,

Rope and sword and stake:

Toiled and suffered, till

It burst, the brightening hope,

"Might and right" and "will and skill,"

That scorned, and does, and will,

Sword and stake and rope!

Wat and Jack and John,

Tyler, Straw, and Ball,

Souls that faltered not,

Hearts like white iron hot,

Still we hear your call!

Yes, your "bell is rung,"

Yes, for "now is time!"

Come hither, every one,

Brave ghosts whose day’s not done,

Avengers of old rime,—

Come and lead the way,

Hushed, implacable,

Suffering no delay,

Forgetting not that day

Dreadful, hateful, fell,

When the liar king,

The liar gentlemen,

Wrought that foulest thing,

Robbing, murdering

Men who’d trusted them! [36]

Come and lead the way,

Hushed, implacable.

What shall stop us, say,

On that day, our day?—

Not unloosened hell!

"ANALOGY."

(To D---- L----.)

Had you lived when a tyrant king

Strove to make all the slaves of one,

With nobles and with churchmen you

Had stood unflinching, pure and true,

To annihilate that hateful thing

Green Runnymeade beat out of John?

Had you lived when a wanton crew,

Flash scoundrels of a day outdone,

Trod down the toilers birth derides,

With Cromwell and his Ironsides

The brave days had discovered you,

Where Naseby saw the gallants run?

And yet you,—this same knight in list

For freedom in her narrow dawn

Against that one, against those few,

Vile king, vile nobles—you, yet you

Stand by the bloody Capitalist,

Fight with the pandar Gentleman!

IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE.

The stars shone faint through the smoky blue;

The church-bells were ringing;

Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,

Tramping and singing.

Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung

As they went along;

Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung

Their defiant song.

It was not too clean, their feminine lay,

But it thrilled me quite

With its challenge to task-master villainous day

And infamous night,

With its threat to the robber rich, the proud,

The respectable free.

And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,

And they shouted to me!

"Girls, that’s the shout, the shout we shall utter

When with rifles and spades,

We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter,

On the barricades!"

A STREET FIGHT.

(To Mr F----.) [38]

Sir, we approve your curling lip and nose

At this vile sight.

These men, these women are brute beasts?—Who knows,

Sir, but that you are right?

Panders and harlots, rogues and thieves and worse,

We are a crew

Whose pitiful plunder’s honoured in the purse

Of gentlemen like you.

Whom holy Competition’s taught (like us)

"What’s thine is mine!"—

How we must love you who have made us thus,

You may perhaps divine!

IN AN EAST END HOVEL.

TO A WORKMAN, A WOULD-BE SUICIDE.

Man of despair and death,

Bought and slaved in the gangs,

Starved and stripped and left

To the pitiful pitiless night,

Away with your selfish thoughts!

Touch not your ignorant life!

Are there no masters of slaves,

Jeering, cynical, strong—

Are there no brigands (say),

With the words of Christ on their lips

And the daggers under their cloaks—

Is there not one of these

That you can steal on and kill?

O as the Swiss mountaineer

Dogged on the perilous heights

His disciplined conqueror foes: [39a]

Caught up one in his arms

And, laughing exultantly,

Plunged with him to the abyss:

So let it be with you!

An eye for an eye, and a tooth

For a tooth, and a life for a life!

Tell it, this hateful strong

Contemptuous hypocrite world,

Tell it that, if we must live

As dogs and as worse than dogs,

At least we can die like men!

Tell it there is a woe

Not for the conquered alone! [39b]

An eye for an eye, and a tooth

For a tooth, and a life for a life!

DUBLIN AT DAWN.

In the chill grey summer dawn-light

We pass through the empty streets;

The rattling wheels are all silent;

No friend his fellow greets.

Here and there, at the corners,

A man in a great-coat stands;

A bayonet hangs by his side, and

A rifle is in his hands.

This is a conquered city;

It speaks of war not peace;

And that’s one of the English soldiers

The English call "police."

You see, at the present moment

That noble country of mine

Is boiling with indignation

At the memory of a "crime."

In a path in the Phœnix Park where

The children romped and ran,

An Irish ruffian met his doom,

And an English gentleman.

For a hundred and over a hundred

Years on the country side

Men and women and children

Have slaved and starved and died,

That those who slaved and starved them

Might spend their earnings then,

And the Irish ruffians have a "good time,"

And the English gentlemen.

And that’s why at the present moment

That noble country of mine

Is boiling with indignation

At the memory of a "crime."

For the Irish ruffians (they tell me),

And it looks as if ’twere true,

And the English gentlemen are so scarce,

We could not spare those two!

In the chill grey summer dawn-light

We pass through the empty streets;

The rattling wheels are all silent;

No friend his fellow greets.

Here and there, at the corners,

A man in a great-coat stands;

A bayonet hangs by his side, and

A rifle is in his hands.

This is a conquered city;

It speaks of war not peace;

And that’s one of the English soldiers

The English call "police."

THE CAGED EAGLE.

. . . I went the other day

To see the birds and beasts they keep enmewed

In the London Zoo. One of the first I saw—

One of the first I noticed, was an eagle.

Ragged, befouled, within his iron bars

He sat without a movement or a sound,

And, when I stood and pitying looked at him,

I saw his great sad eyes that winkless gazed

Out to the horizon sky. I passed from there,

And walked about the gardens, hither and thither,

Till all the afternoon was spent. Returning then

To seek my home, again by chance I passed

The eagle’s cage, and stood again, and looked,

And saw his great sad eyes that winkless gazed

Out to the horizon sky. So I went home . . .

The eagle is Ireland!

"IRELAND."

O we have loved you through cold and rain

And pitiless frost,

Consuming our offering of blood and of brain

Gladly again and again and again,

Though it all seemed lost,

Ireland, Ireland!

O we will fight, fight on for you till

Your anguish is past,

The wronged ones righted, the tyrants still.—

Though God has not saved you, yet we will,

At the last, at the last,

Ireland, Ireland!

O we will love you in warmth and light

And the happy day,

When you have forgotten the terrible night,

Standing proud and beautiful bright

For ever and aye,

Ireland, Ireland!

TO CHARLES PARNELL.

One thing we praise you for that is past praise—

The dauntless eyes that faced the rain and night,

The hand that never wearied in the fight,

Till, through the dark’s despair, the dawn’s delays,

It rose, that vision of forgotten days,

Ireland, a nation in her right and might,

As fearless of the lightning as the Light,—

Freedom, the noon-tide sun that shines and stays!

O brave, O pure, O hater of the wrong,

(The wrong that is as one with England’s name,

Tyranny with cant of liberty, and shame

With boast of righteousness), to you belong

Trust for the hate that blinds our foes like flame,

Love for the hope that makes our hearts so strong!

AN "ASSASSIN."

. . . They caught them at the bend. He and his son

Sat in the car, revolvers in their laps.

From either side the stone-walled wintry road

There flashed thin fire-streaks in the rainy dusk.

The father swayed and fell, shot through the chest.

The son was up, but one more fire-streak leaped

Close from the pitch-black of a thick-set bush

Not five yards from him, and lit all the face

Of him whose sweetheart walked the Dublin streets

For lust of him who gave one yell and fell

Flat on the stony road, a sweltering corse.

Then they came out, the men who did this thing,

And looked upon their hatred’s retribution,

While heedlessly the rattling car fled on.

Grey-haired old wolf, your letch for peasants’ blood,

For peasants’ sweat turned gold and silver and bronze,

Is done, is done, for ever and ever is done!

O foul young fox, no more young girls’ fresh lips

Shall bruise and bleed to cool your lecher’s lust.

Slowly from out the great high terraced clouds

The round moon sailed. The dead were left alone.

I talked with one of those who did this thing,

A coughing half-starved lad, mere skin and bone.

I said: "They found upon those dead men, gold.

Why did you not take it?" Then with proud-raised head,

He looked at me and said: "Sorr, we’re not thaves!"

Brother, from up the maimed and mangled earth,

Strewn with our flesh and bones, wet with our blood,

Let that great word go up to unjust heaven

And smite the cheek of the devil they’ve called "God!"

"HOLY RUSSIA."

Crouched in the terrible land,

The circle of pitiless ice,

With frozen bloody feet

And her pestilential summer’s

Fever-throb in her brow,

Look, in her deep slow eyes

The mists of her sleep of faith

Stir, and a gleam of light,

The ray of a blood-red sun,

Beams out into the dusk.

From far away, from the west,

From the east, from the south, there come

Faint sweet breaths of the breeze

Of plenteous warmth and light.

And she moves, and around her neck

She feels the iron-scaled Snake

Whose fangs suck at the heart

Hid by her tattered dress,

By her lean and hanging teat.

Russia, O land of faith,

O realm of the ageless Slav,

O oppressed one of eternity,

This darkest hour is the hour,

The hour of the coming dawn!

Europe the rank, the corrupt,

Lies stretched out at your feet.

Turkey, India, lo all,

East and south, it is yours!

Years, years ago a nation, [44]

Oppressed as you are oppressed,

Burst her bonds and leaped out,

A volcanic sea-wave of fire,

Quenched at last but in blood,

Though not before the red spray

Dashed the Pyramids, the Escurial,

Rome and your own grey Kremlin.

That was the great sea-wave

Of a nation that disbelieved,

Of a nation that had not faith!

What shall the sea-wave be

Of this race of eternal belief,

This nation of a passionate faith?

PÈRE-LA-CHAISE. [45]

(Paris.)

I stood in Père-la-Chaise. The putrid city,

Paris, the harlot of the nations, lay,

The bug-bright thing that knows not love nor pity,

Flashing her bare shame to the summer’s day.

Here where I stand, they slew you, brothers, whom

Hell’s wrongs unutterable had made as mad.

The rifle-shots re-echoed in his tomb,

The gilded scoundrel’s who had been so glad.

O Morny, O blood-sucker of thy race!

O brain, O hand that wrought out empire that

The lust in one for power, for tinsel place,

Might rest; one lecher’s hungry heart grow fat,—

Is it for nothing, now and evermore,

O you whose sin in life had death in ease,

The murder of your victims beats the door

Wherein your careless carrion lies at peace?

AUX TERNES. [46]

(Paris.)

She.—"Up and down, up and down,

From early eve to early day.

Life is quicker in the town;

When you’ve leisure, anyway!

"Down and up, down and up!

O will no one stop and speak?

I would really like to sup,

And my limbs are heavy and weak.

"What’s my price, sir? I’m no Jew.

If with me you wish to sleep,

’Tis five francs, sir. Surely you

Will admit that that is cheap?"

He.—"Christ, if you are not stone blind,

Stone deaf also, you know it is

Christian towns leave far behind

Sodom and those other cities.

"Bid your Father strike this town,

Wipe it utterly away!

Weary, hungry, up and down

From early eve to early day?

"Magdalen knew nought like this;

She had food and roof above;

Seven devils, too, did she possess;

This poor soul had but one—love!

"O my sister, take me, kill me!

I am one of those who once

Only cared to feast and fill me

On these robbed and murdered ones.

"Kill me? Nay, but love me; listen.

I have too a gospel word,

Fit to make still, dull eyes glisten,

And, like Christ’s, it brings a sword!

"No, Christ is not deaf nor blind;

He’s but dust in Syrian ground,

And his Father has declined

To a parson’s phrase, a sound.

"Not by such, then, but by us

These hell-wrongs must be redressed.

Take this morsel venomous;

Nourish it within your breast.

"You must live on, live and hate;

Conquer wrath, despair and pain;

For "we bid you hope" and wait

Till the Red Flag flies again:

"Till once more the people rise,

Once more, once and only once,

Blood-red hands and blazing eyes

Of the robbed and murdered ones!

"So good night, dear desperate heart.

(Nay, ’tis sun-bright day we keep.)

Soon we meet, though now we part.

Kiss me . . . Take it . . . Go and sleep!"

"THE TRUTH."

Come then, let us at least know what’s the truth.

Let us not blink our eyes and say

We did not understand; old age or youth

Benumbed our sense or stole our sight away.

It is a lie—just that, a lie—to declare

That wages are the worth of work.

No; they are what the Employer wills to spare

To let the Employee sheer starvation shirk.

They’re the life-pittance Competition leaves,

The least for which brother’ll slay brother.

He who the fruits of this hell-strife receives,

He is a thief, an assassin, and none other!

It is a lie—just that, a lie—to declare

That Rent’s the interest on just gains.

Rent’s the thumb-screw that makes the worker share

With him who worked not the produce of his pains.

Rent’s the wise tax the human tape-worm knows.

The fat he takes; the life-lean leaves.

The holy Landlord is, as we suppose,

Just this—the model of assassin-thieves!

What is the trick the rich-man, then, contrives?

How play my lords their brilliant rôles?—

They live on the plunder of our toiling lives,

The degradation of our bodies and souls!

TO THE SONS OF LABOUR.

Grave this deep in your hearts,

Forget not the tale of the past!

Never, never believe

That any will help you, or can,

Saving only yourselves!

What have the gentlemen done,

Peerless haters of wrong,

Byrons and Shelleys, what?

They stand great famous names,

Demi-gods to their own,

Shadows far off, alien

To us and ours for ever.

Those who love them and hate

The crime, the injustice they hated,

What can they do but shout,

Win a name from our woes,

And leave us just as we were?

No, but resolutely turned,

Our wants, our desires made clear,

And clear the means that shall win them,

Drill and drill and drill!

Then when the day is come,

When the royal battle-flag’s up,

When blood has been spilled in vain

In timid half-hearted war,

Then let the Cromwell rise,

The simple, the true-souled man;

Then let Grant come forth,

The calm, the determined comrade,

But deep in their hearts one hate,

Deep in their souls one thought,

To bring the iniquity low,

To make the People free!

Ah, for such as these

We with the same heart-hate,

We with the same soul-thought,

Will fall to our destined places

In the ranks of the great New Model, [49]

In the Army that sees ahead

Marston, Naseby, Whitehall,

The Wilderness, Petersburg,—yes,

But beyond the blood and the smoke,

Beyond the struggle and death,

The Union victorious safe,

The Commonwealth glorious free!

TO THE ARTISTS.

You tell me these great lords have raised up Art:

I say they have degraded it. Look you,

When ever did they let the poet sing,

The painter paint, the sculptor hew and cast,

The music raise her heavenly voice, except

To praise them and their wretched rule o’er men?

Behold our English poets that were poor

Since these great lords were rich and held the state:

Behold the glories of the German land,

Poets, musicians, driven, like them, to death

Unless they’d tune their spirits’ harps to play

Drawing-room pieces for the chattering fools

Who aped the taste for Art or for a leer.

Go to, no Art was ever noble yet,

Noble and high, the speech of godlike men,

When fetters bound it, be they gold or flowers.

All that is noblest, highest, greatest, best,

Comes from the Galilean peasant’s hut, comes from

The Stratford village, the Ayrshire plough, the shop

That gave us Chaucer, the humble Milton’s trade—

Bach’s, Mozart’s, great Beethoven’s,—And these are they

Who knew the People, being what they knew!

Go to, if in the future years no strain,

No picture of earth’s glory like to what

Your Artists raised for that small clique or this

Of supercilious imbecilities—

O if no better demi-gods of Art

Can rise save those whose barbarous tinsel yet

Makes hideous all the beauty of old homes—

Then let us seek the comforts of despair

In democratic efforts dead and gone:

Weep with Pheideian Athens, sigh an hour

With Raffaelle’s Florence, beat the head and breast

O’er Shakspere’s England that from Milton’s took

In lips the name that leaped from lead and flame

From out her heart against the Spanish guns!

"ONE AMONG SO MANY."

. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me,

Importuning, one wet and mild March night.

We walked and talked together. O her tale

Was very common; thousands know it all!

Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming;

Parents that railed; London; the child born dead;

A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls

"Taken on" a few months at a dressmaker’s

In the crush of the "season;" thirteen shillings a week!

The fashionable people’s dresses done,

And they flown off, these fifty extra girls

Sent—to the streets: that is, to work that gives

Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes

Respectable employers all demand

Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!

And she—"Why, I have gone on down and down,

And there’s the gutter, look, that I shall die in!"

"My dear," I say, "where hope of all but that

Is gone, ’tis time, I think, life were gone too."

She looks at me. "That I should kill myself?"—

"That you should kill yourself."—"That would be sin,

And God would punish me!"—"And will not God

Punish for this?" She pauses: then whispers:

"No, no, He will forgive me, for He knows!"

I laughed aloud: "And you," she said, "and you,

Who are so good, so noble" . . . "Noble? Good?"

I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat.

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep

Of this vast flock that perishes alone

Out in the pitiless desert!—Yet she’d speak:

She’d ask me: she’d entreat: she’d demonstrate.

O I must not say that! I must believe!

Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the sky

So big and blue and pure above it all?

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep,

Entreat no more and demonstrate no more;

For I believe there is a God, a God

Not in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no,

But in the heart of man, on the dear lips

Of angel women, of heroic men!

O hopeless wanderer that would not stay,

("It is too late, I cannot rise again!")

O saint of faith in love behind the veils,

("You must believe in God, for you are good!"),

O sister who made holy with your kiss,

Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of March

There in the hideous infamous London streets

My cheek, and made my soul a sacred place,

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep!

THE NEW LOCKSLEY HALL.

"forty years after."

Comrade, yet a little further I would go before the night

Closes round and chills in darkness all the glorious sunset light—

Yet a little, by the cliff there, till the stately home I see

Of the man who once was with us, comrade once with you and me!

Nay, but leave me, pass alone there; stay awhile and gaze again

On the various-jewelled waters and the dreamy southern main,

For the evening breeze is sighing in the quiet of the hills

Moving down in cliff and terrace to the singing sweet sea-rills,

While the river, silent-stealing, thro’ the copse and thro’ the lea

Winds her waveless way eternal to the welcome of the sea.

Yes, within that green-clad homestead, gardened grounds and

velvet ease

Of a home where culture reigneth and the chambers whisper peace,

Is the man, the seer and singer, who (ah, years and years away!)

Lifted up a face of gladness at the breaking of the day.

For the noontide’s desperate ardours that had seen the Roman town

Wrap the boy Keats, "by the hungry generations trodden down,"

In his death-shroud with the ashes of the fairy child of storm,

Fluttering skylark in the breakers, caught and smothered by the

foam,

And had closed those eyes heroic, weary for the final peace.

Byron maimed and maddened, strangled in the anguish that was

Greece—

For this noontide passed to darkness, brooding doubt and wild

dismay,

Where the silly sparrows chirruped and the eagles swooped away,

Till once more the trampled Peoples and the murdered soul of man

Raised a haggard face half-wondering where the new-born day

began,

Where the sign of Faith’s renewal, Faith’s, and Hope’s, and Love’s,

outgrew

In the golden sun arising; and we hailed it, we and you!

O you hailed it, and your heart beat, and your pretty woman’s lays,

In the fathomless vibration of our rapturous amaze,

Died for ever on your harpstrings, and you rose and struck a chord

High, full, clear, heroic, godlike, "for the glory of the Lord!"

Noble words you spoke; we listened; and we dreamed the day had

come

When the faith of God and Christ should sound one cry with Man’s

freedom—

When the men who stood beside us, eager with hell’s troops to cope,

Radiant, thrilled exultant, proud, with the magnificence of hope!

"Forward! forward!" ran our watch-word. "Forward! forward!" by

our side

You gave back the glorious summons. Would that day that you had

died!

Better lying fallen, death-struck, breathless, bleeding, on your face,

With your bright sword pointing onward, dying happy in your

place!

Better to have passed in spirit from the battle-storm’s eclipse

With the great Cause in your heart and with the war-shout on your

lips!

Better to have fallen charging, having known the nobler time,

In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line—

Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead,

Up the slopes and thro’ the smoke-clouds, thro’ the dying and the

dead,

Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout,

On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!

O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain

That remembered Egypt’s flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed

again—

Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills,

And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills.

There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves,

(Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of

slaves,

Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stew

Where freedom "broadens down" so slow it stops with lords and

you!

O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes,

Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times,

Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet

knights

Tilted gaily or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights?

O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best,

Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not

rest—

Men of science, "vivisectors!"—democrats, the "rout of beasts"—

Writers, essayists and poets, "Belial’s prophets, Moloch’s priests!"

Coward, you have made the great refusal? you have won the gilded

praise

Of the wringers of his heart’s-blood from the peasant’s sunless days,

Of the lord and the land-owner, of the rich man who has bound

Labour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the

ground,

With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had,

Crying, "Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them

mad!"

Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to take

What of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood’s sake,

Blustering long and loudest at the hideousness and pain

These you praise have brought upon us; blustering long and loud

again

At our agony and anguish in this desperate fight of ours,

Grappling with anarch custom and the darkness and the powers!

O begone, then, from among us! Echo not, however faint,

Our great watch-word, our great war-shout, sweet and sickly poet-

saint!

Sit there dreaming in your gardens, looking out upon the sea,

Till the night-time closes round you and the wind is on the lea.

Enter then within your chambers in the rich and quiet light;

Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night.

Soothe your fancy with your visions; bend a gracious senile ear

To the praise your guests are murmuring in the tone you love to

hear.

Honoured of your Queen, and honoured of the gentlest and the

best,

Lord and commoner and rich-man, smirking tenant, shopman,

priest,

All distinguished and respectable, the shiny sons of light,

O what, O what are these who call you coward in the night?

Ay, what are we who struggled for the cause of Science, say,

Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Häckel, marshalling our stern array?

We who raised the cry for Culture, Goethe’s spirit leading on,

Marching gladly with our captains, Renan, Arnold, Emerson?

We, we are not tinkers, tinkers of the kettle cracked and broke,

Tailors squatted cross-legged, patching at the greasy worn-out

cloak!

We are those that faced mad Fortune, cried: "The Truth, and only

she!

Onward, upward! If we perish, we at least will perish free!"

We have lost our souls to win them, in the house and in the street

Falling stabbed and poisoned, making a victory of defeat.

We have lost the happy present, we have paid death’s heavy debt,

We have won, have won the Future, and its sons shall not forget!

Enter, then, within your chamber in the rich and quiet light;

Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night;

Spread your nostrils to the incense, hearken to the murmured hymn

Of the praising people, rising from the temple fair and dim.

Ah, but we here in the tempest, we here struggling in the night,

See the worshippers out-stealing; see the temple emptying quite;

See the godhead turning ghostlike; see the pride of name and fame

Paling slowly, sad and sickly, with forgetfulness and shame! . . .

Darker, darker grows the night now, louder, louder cries the wind;

I can hear the dash of breakers and the deep sea moves behind,

I can see the ghostlike phalanx rushing on the crumbling shore,

Slowly but surely shattering its rampart evermore.

And my comrade’s voice is calling, and his solitary cry

On the great dark swift air-currents like Fate’s summons sweepeth

by.

Farewell, then, whom once I loved so, whom a boy I thrilled to hear

Urging courage and reliance, loathing acquiescent fear.

I must leave you; I must wander to a strange and distant land,

Facing all that Fate shall give me with her hard unequal hand—

I once more anew must face them, toil and trouble and disease,

But these a man may face and conquer, for there waits him death

and peace

And the freedom from dishonour and denial e’er confessed

Of what he knows is truest, what most beautiful and best!

O farewell, then! I must leave you. You have chosen. You are right.

You have made the great refusal; you have shunned the wind and

night.

You have won your soul, and won it—No, not lost it, as they tell—

Happy, blest of gods and monarchs, O a long, a long farewell!

Freshwater, Isle of Wight.

FAREWELL TO THE MARKET.

"susannah and mary-jane."

Two little darlings alone,

Clinging hand in hand;

Two little girls come out

To see the wonderful land!

Here round the flaring stalls

They stand wide-eyed in the throng,

While the great, the eloquent huckster

Perorates loud and long.

They watch those thrice-blessed mortals,

The dirty guzzling boys,

Who partake of dates, periwinkles,

Ices and other joys.

And their little mouths go wide open

At some of the brilliant sights

That little darlings may see in the road

Of Edgware on Saturday nights.

The eldest’s name is Susannah;

She was four years old last May.

And Mary-Jane, the youngest,

Is just three years old to-day.

And I know all about their cat, and

Their father and mother too,

And "Pigshead," their only brother,

Who got his head jammed in the flue.

And they know several particulars

Of a similar sort of me,

For we went up and down together

For over an hour, we three.

And Susannah walked beside me,

As became the wiser and older,

Fast to one finger, but Mary-Jane

Sat solemnly up on my shoulder.

And we bought some sweets, and a monkey

That climbed up a stick "quite nice."

And then last we adjourned for refreshments,

And the ladies had each an ice.

And Susannah’s ice was a pink one,

And she sucked it up so quick,

But Mary-Jane silently proffered

Her ice to me for a lick.

And then we went home to mother,

And we found her upon the floor,

And father was trying to balance

His shoulders against the door.

And Susannah said "O" and "Please, sir,

We’ll go in ourselves, sir!" And

We kissed one another and parted,

And they stole in hand in hand.

And it’s O for my two little darlings

I never shall see again,

Though I stand for the whole night watching

And crying here in the rain!

II.

"HERE AND THERE."

IN THE PIT.

"chant of the firemen."

"This is the steamer’s pit.

The ovens like dragons of fire

Glare thro’ their close-lidded eyes

With restless hungry desire.

"Down from the tropic night

Rushes the funnelled air;

Our heads expand and fall in;

Our hearts thump huge as despair.

"’Tis we make the bright hot blood

Of this throbbing inanimate thing;

And our life is no less the fuel

Than the coal we shovel and fling.

"And lest of this we be proud

Or anything but meek,

We are well cursed and paid—

Ten shillings a week!"

Round, round, round in its tunnel

The shaft turns pitiless strong,

While lost souls cry out in the darkness:

"How long, O Lord, how long?"

A MAHOMMADAN SHIP FIREMAN.

Up from the oven pit,

The hell where poor men toil,

At the sunset hour he comes

Clean-clothed, washed from soil.

On the fo’c’s’le head he kneels,

His face to the hallowed West.

He prays, and bows and prays.

Does he pray for death and rest?

TO INDIA.

O India, India, O my lovely land—

At whose sweet throat the greedy English snake,

With fangs and lips that suck and never slake,

Clings, while around thee, band by stifling band,

The loathsome shape twists, chaining foot and hand—

O from this death-swoon must thou never wake,

From limbs enfranchised these foul fetters to shake,

And, proud among the nations, to rise and stand?

Nay, but thine eyes, thine eyes wherein there stays

The patience of that august faith that scorns

The tinsel creed of Christ, dream still and gaze

Where, not within the timeless East and haze,

The haunt of that wan moon with fading horns,

There breaks the first of Himalayan morns!

TO ENGLAND.

I.

There was a time when all thy sons were proud

To speak thy name,

England, when Europe echoed back aloud

Thy fearless fame:

When Spain reeled shattered helpless from thy guns

And splendid ire,

When from Canadian snows to Indian suns

Pitt’s soul was fire.

O that in days like these were, fair and free

From shame and scorn,

Fate had allowed, benignly, pityingly

That I was born!

O that, if struck, then struck with glorious wounds,

I bore apart

(Not torn with fangs of leprous coward hounds)

My bleeding heart!

II.

We hate you—not because of cruel deeds

Staining a glorious effort. They who live

Learn in this earth to give and to forgive,

Where heart and soul are noble and fate’s needs

Imperious: No, nor yet that cruel seeds

Of power and wrong you’ve sown alternative,

We hate you, we your sons who yet believe

That truth and justice are not empty creeds!

No, but because of greed and golden pay,

Wages of sin and death: because you smother

Your conscience, making cursèd all the day.

Bible in one hand, bludgeon in the other,

Cain-like you come upon and slay your brother,

And, kneeling down, thank God for it, and pray!

III.

I whom you fed with shame and starved with woe,

I wheel above you,

Your fatal vulture, for I hate you so,

I almost love you!

I smell your ruin out. I light and croak

My sombre lore,

As swaggering you go by, O heart of oak

Rotten to the core!

Look westward! Ireland’s vengeful eyes are cast

On freedom won.

Look eastward! India stirs from sleep at last.

You are undone!

Look southward, where Australia hears your voice,

And turns away!

O brutal hypocrite, she makes her choice

With the rising day!

Foul Esau, you who sold your high birthright

For gilded mud,

Who did the wrong and, priestlike, called it right,

And swindled God!

The hour is gone of insult, pain and patience;

The hour is come

When they arise, the faithful mightier nations,

To drag you down!

IV.

England, the land I loved

With passionate pride,

For hate of whom I live

Who for love had died,

Can I, while shines the sun,

That hour regain

When I again may come to thee

And love again?

No, not while that flag

Of greed and lust

Flaunts in the air, untaught

To drag the dust!—

Never, till expiant,

I see you kneel,

And, brandished, gleams aloft

The foeman’s steel!

Ah, then to speed, and laugh,

As my heart caught the knife:

"Mother, I love you! Here,

Here is my life!"

HONG-KONG LYRICS.

I.

At anchor in that harbour of the island,

The Chinese gate,

We lay where, terraced under green-clad highland,

The sea-town sate.

Ships, steamers, sailors, many a flag and nation,

A motley crew,

Junks, sampans, all East’s swarming jubilation,

I watched and knew.

Then, as I stood, sweet sudden sounds out-swelling

On the boon breeze,

The church-bells’ chiming echoes rang out, telling

Of inland peace.

O English chimes, your music rising and falling

I cannot praise,

Although to me it come sweet-sad recalling

Dear childish days.

Yet, English chimes,—last links of chains that sever,

Worn out and done,

That land and creed that I have left for ever,—

Ring on, ring on!

II.

There is much in this sea-way city

I have not met with before,

But one or two things I notice

That I seem to have known of yore.

In the lovely tropical verdure,

In the streets, behold I can

The hideous English buildings

And the brutal English man!

III.

I stand and watch the soldiers

Marching up and down,

Above the fresh green cricket-ground

Just outside the town.

I stand and watch and wonder

When in the English land

This poor fool Tommy Atkins

Will learn and understand?

Zulus, and Boers, and Arabs,

All fighting to be free,

Men and women and children,

Murdered and maimed has he.

In India and in Ireland

He’s held the People down,

While the robber English gentleman

Took pound and penny and crown.

To make him false to his order,

What was it that they gave—

To make him his brother’s oppressor?

The clothes and pay of a slave!

O thou poor fool, Tommy Atkins,

Thou wilt be wise that day

When, with eager eyes and clenched teeth,

Thou risest up to say:

"This is our well-loved England,

And I’ll free it, if I can,

From every rotten bourgeois

And played-out gentleman!"

IV.

"happy valley." [66]

There is a valley green that lies

’Mid hills, the summer’s bower.

The many coloured butterflies

Flutter from flower to flower.

And round one lush green side of it,

In gardened homes are laid,

With grief and care compassionate,

The people of the dead.

There all the voicing summer day

They sing, the happy rills.

No noisy sound awakes away

The echo of the hills.

A GLIMPSE OF CHINA.

I.

in a sampan.

(Min River, Fo Kien.)

Up in the misty morning,

Up past the gardened hills,

With the rhythmic stroke of the rowers,

While the blue deep pales and thrills!

Past the rice-fields green low-lying,

Where the sea-gull’s winging down

From the fleets of junks and sampans

And the ancient Chinese Town!

II.

in a chair.

(Foo-chow.)

From the bright and blinding sunshine,

From the whirling locust’s song,

Into the dark and narrow fissures

Of the streets I am borne along.

Here and there dusky-beaming

A sun-shaft broadens and drops

On the brown bare crowd slow-passing

The crowd of the open shops.

We move on over the bridges

With their straight-hewn blocks of stone.

And their quaint grey animal figures,

And the booths the hucksters own.

Behind a linen awning

Sits an ancient wight half-dead,

And a little dear of a girl is

Examining—his head.

On a bended bamboo shouldered,

Bearing a block of stone,

Two worn-out coolies half-naked

Utter their grunting groan.

Children, almond-eyed beauties,

Impossibly mangy curs,

Take part in the motley stream of

Insouciant passengers.

This is the dream, the vision

That comes to me and greets—

The vision of Retribution

In the labyrinthine streets!

III.

"caste."

These Chinese toil and yet they do not starve,

And they obey, and yet they are not slaves.

It is the "free-born" fuddled Englishmen

That grovel rotting in their living graves.

These Chinese do not fawn with servile lips;

They lift up equal eyes that ask and scan.

Their degradation has escaped at least

That choicest curse of all—the gentleman!

IV.

over the samovar. [69a]

(Foo-chow.)

"Yes, I used always to think

That you Russians knew

How to make the good drink

As none others do.

"And I thought moreover,

(Not with the epicures),

You might search the world over

For such women as yours.

"In both these matters now

I perceive I was right,

And I really can’t tell you how

Much I delight

"In my third (Thanks, another cup!)

Idea of the fun,

When your country gets up

And follows the sun!

"And just as in Europe, see,

There’s a conqueror nation,

So why not in Asia be

A like jubilation?

"Taught as well as organized, [69b]

The eternal Coolie,

From being robbed and despised,

Takes to cutting throats duly!

"But—please, don’t be flurried;

For I daresay by then

You’ll be comfortably buried,

Ladies and gentlemen!

"No more, thanks! I must be going!

I’m so glad to have made this

Opportunity of knowing

Some more Russian ladies!"

TO JAPAN.

Simple you were, and good. No kindlier heart

Beat than the heart within your gentle breast.

Labour you had, and happiness, and rest,

And were the maid of nations. Now you start

To feverish life, feeling the poisonous smart

Upon your lips of harlot lips close-pressed,

The lips of her who stands among the rest

With greasy righteous soul and rotten heart.

O sunrise land, O land of gentleness,

What madness drives you to lust’s dreadful bed?

O thrice accursèd England, wretchedness

For ever be on you, of whom ’tis said,

Prostitute plague-struck, that you catch and kiss

Innocent lives to make them foully dead!

DAI BUTSU. [70]

(Kama Kura.)

He sits. Upon the kingly head doth rest

The round-balled wimple, and the heavy rings

Touch on the shoulders where the shadow clings.

The downward garment shows the ambiguous breast;

The face—that face one scarce can look on lest

One learn the secret of unspeakable things;

But the dread gaze descends with shudderings,

To the veiled couched knees, the hands and thumbs close-pressed.

O lidded, downcast eyes that bear the weight

Of all our woes and terrible wrong’s increase:

Proud nostrils, lips proud-perfecter than these,

With what a soul within you do you wait!

Disdain and pity, love late-born of hate,

Passion eternal, patience, pain and peace!

"ENGLAND."

Where’er I go in this dense East,

In sunshine or shade,

I retch at the villainous feast

That England has made.

And my shame cannot understand,

As scorn springs elate,

How I ever loved that land

That now I hate!

THE FISHERMAN.

(Mindanao, Philippines.)

In the dark waveless sea,

Deep blue under deep blue,

The fisher drifts by on the tide

In his small pole-balanced canoe.

Above him the cloud-clapped hills

Crown the dense jungly sweeps;

The cocoa-nut groves hedge round

The hut where the beach-wave sleeps.

Is it not better so

To be as this savage is,

Than to live the wage-slave’s life

Of hopeless agonies?

A SOUTH-SEA ISLANDER.

Aloll in the warm clear water,

On her back with languorous limbs,

She lies. The baby upon her breasts

Paddles and falls and swims.

With half-closed eyes she smiles,

Guarding it with her hands;

And the sob swells up in my heart—

In my heart that understands.

Dear, in the English country,

The hatefullest land on earth,

The mothers are starved and the children die,

And death is better than birth!

NEW GUINEA "CONVERTS."

I saw them as they were born,

Erect and fearless and free,

Facing the sun and the wind

Of the hills and the sea.

I saw them naked, superb,

Like the Greeks long ago,

With shield and spear and arrow

Ready to strike and throw.

I saw them as they were made

By the Christianizing crows,

Blinking, stupid, clumsy

In their greasy ill-cut clothes:

I heard their gibbering cant,

And they sung those hymns that smell

Of poor souls besotted, degraded

With the fear of "God" and "hell."

And I thought if Jesus could see them,

He who loved the freedom, the light,

And loathed those who compassed heaven

And earth for one proselyte,

To make him, etcetera, etcetera,—

Then this sight, as on me or you,

Would act on him like an emetic,

And he’d have to go off and spue.

O Jesus, O man of the People,

Who died to abolish all this—

The pharisee rank and respectable,

The scribe and the greedy priest—

O Jesus, O sacred Socialist,

You would die again of shame,

If you were alive and could see

What things are done in your name.

A DEATH AT SEA.

(Coral Sea, Australia.)

I.

Dead in the sheep-pen he lies,

Wrapped in an old brown sail.

The smiling blue sea and the skies

Know not sorrow nor wail.

Dragged up out of the hold,

Dead on his last way home,

Worn-out, wizened, a Chinee old,—

O he is safe—at home!

Brother, I stand not as these

Staring upon you here.

One of earth’s patient toilers at peace

I see, I revere!

II.

In the warm cloudy night we go

From the motionless ship;

Our lanterns feebly glow;

Our oars drop and drip.

We land on the thin pale beach,

The coral isle’s round us;

A glade of driven sand we reach;

Our burial ground’s found us.

There we dig him a grave, jesting;

We know not his name.

What heeds he who is resting, resting?

Would I were the same!

Come away, it is over and done!

Peace and he shall not sever,

By moonlight nor light of the sun,

For ever and ever!

III.

"dirge."

"Sleep in the pure driven sand,

(No one will know)

In the coral isle by the land

Where the blue tides come and go.

"Alive, thou wert poor, despised;

Dead, thou canst have

What mightiest monarchs have prized,

An eternal grave!

"Alone with the lovely isles,

With the lovely deep,

Where the sea-winds sing and the sunlight smiles

Thou liest asleep!"

III.

"AUSTRALIA:

victoria—new south wales—queensland."

THE OUTCASTS.

(Melbourne.)

Here to the parks they come,

The scourings of the town,

Like weary wounded animals

Seeking where to lie them down.

Brothers, let us take together

An easeful period.

There is worse than to be as we are—

Cast out, not of men but of God!

VICTORIA TO JAMES MOORHOUSE, [76]

Bishop of Melbourne, who left Melbourne for the Bishopric of

Manchester, 10th March 1886.

He came, a stranger, and we gave him welcome

More as loved friend than rumour’s honoured guest.

He spoke! Were we, then, all so slack to listen?

To hail him as our wisest, noblest, best?

Why did he leave us?

He toiled! And we, we under such a leader,

Forgot all other creeds, but that he taught,

And proud of our clear answer to his summons,

Forgot all other fights but that he fought!

Why did he leave us?

He wearied! ’Twas too great, he said, the burden.

We saw it and we cried with anxious love;

"What does he (Let him back!) down in the battle?

Is not the general’s place at rest above?"

Why did he leave us?

He left us for a "wider sphere of labour!"

A tinsel seat within a House that shakes,

To herd with priests meal-mouthed, with lords and liars

That still would bind a nation’s chain that breaks!

Why did he leave us?

Farewell, then! Are there any to reproach you

In all this facile crowd that weeps and cheers?

Not one! But, ah you yet shall listen sadly

To an echo falling faint through the dead years:—

Why did he leave us?

IN THE SEA-GARDENS.

(Sydney.)

"the man of the nation."

Yonder the band is playing

And the fine young people walk.

They are envying each other and talking

Their pretty empty talk.

There, in the shade on the outskirts,

Stretched on the grass, I see

A man with a slouch hat, smoking.

That is the man for me!

That is the Man of the Nation;

He works and much endures.

When all the rest is rotten,

He rises and cuts and cures.

He’s the soldier of the Crimea,

Fighting to honour fools;

He’s the grappler and strangler of Lee

Lord of the terrible tools.

He’s in all the conquered nations

That have won their own at last,

And in all that yet shall win it.

And the world by him goes past!

O strong sly world, this nameless

Still, much-enduring Man,

Is the hand of God that shall clutch you

For all you have done, or can!

"UPSTARTS."

What? do you say that we, the toilers—the slaves—

(Why strain at the gnat name

Who swallow the camel thing your pocket craves?)—

That we are "just the same,"

(Nay, worse) when power is ours and wealth—that we

Are harder masters still,

More keen to ring her last from misery,

More greedy of our will?

’Tis true! And when you see men so—see us

Sneer at us, call us swine!—

"How we must love you who have made us thus,

You may perhaps divine!"

LABOUR—CAPITAL—LAND.

In that rich archipelago of sea

With fiery hills, thick woods wherein the mias [79a]

Browses along the trees, and god-like men

Leave monuments of speech too large for us, [79b]

There are strange forest-trees. Far up, their roots

Spread from the central trunk, and settle down

Deep in the life-fed earth, seventy feet below.

In the past days here grew another tree,

On whose high fork the parasitic seed

Fell and sprang up, and, finding life and strength

In the disease, decrepitude and death

Of that it fed on, utterly consumed it,

And stands the monument of Nature’s crime!

So Labour with his parasites, the two

Great swollen robbers, Land and Capital,

Stands to the gaze of men but as a heap

Of rotted dust whose only use must be

To rich the roots of the proud stem that killed it! [80]

AUSTRALIA.

I see a land of desperate droughts and floods:

I see a land where need keeps spreading round,

And all but giants perish in the stress:

I see a land where more, and more, and more

The demons, Earth and Wealth, grow bloat and strong.

I see a land that lies a helpless prey

To wealthy cliques and gamblers and their slaves,

The huckster politicians: a poor land

That less and less can make her heart-wish law.

Yea, but I see a land where some few brave

Raise clear eyes to the Struggle that must come,

Reaching firm hands to draw the doubters in,

Preaching the gospel: "Drill and drill and drill!"

Yea, but I see a land where best of all

The hope of victory burns strong and bright!

ART.

"Yes, let Art go, if it must be

That with it men must starve—

If Music, Painting, Poetry

Spring from the wasted hearth!"

Yes, let Art go, till once again

Through fearless heads and hands

The toil of millions and the pain

Be passed from out the lands:

Till from the few their plunder falls

To those who’ve toiled and earned

But misery’s hopeless intervals

From those who’ve robbed and spurned.

Yes, let Art go, without a fear,

Like autumn flowers we burn,

For, with her reawakening year,

Be sure she will return!—

Return, but greater, nobler yet

Because her laurel crown

With dew and not with blood is wet,

And as our queen sit down!

"HENRY GEORGE."

(Melbourne.)

I came to buy a book. It was a shop

Down in a narrow quiet street, and here

They kept, I knew, these socialistic books.

I entered. All was bare, but clean and neat.

The shelves were ranged with unsold wares; the counter

Held a few sheets and papers. Here and there

Hung prints and calendars. I rapped, and straight

A young girl came out through the inner door.

She had a clear and simple face; I saw

She had no beauty, loveliness, nor charm,

But, as your eyes met those grey light-lit eyes

Like to a mountain spring so pure, you thought:

"He’d be a clever man who looked, and lied!"

I asked her for the book. . . . We spoke a little. . . .

Her words were as her face was, as her eyes.

Yes, she’d read many books like this of mine:

Also some poets, Shelley, Byron too,

And Tennyson, but ‘poets only dreamed!’

Thus, then, we talked, until by chance I spoke

A phrase and then a name. ’Twas "Henry George."

Her face lit up. O it was beautiful,

Or never woman’s face was! "Henry George?"

She said. And then a look, a flush, a smile,

Such as sprung up in Magdalenè’s cheek

When some voice uttered Jesus, made her angel.

She turned and pointed up the counter. I,

Loosing mine eyes from that ensainted face,

Looked also. ’Twas a print, a common print,

The head and shoulders of some man. She said,

Quite in a whisper: "That’s him, Henry George!"

Darling, that in this life of wrong and woe,

The lovely woman-soul within you brooded

And wept and loved and hated and pitied,

And knew not what its helplessness could do,

Its helplessness, its sheer bewilderment—

That then those eyes should fall, those angel eyes,

On one who’d brooded, wept, loved, hated, pitied,

Even as you had, but therefrom had sprung

A hope, a plan, a scheme to right this wrong,

And make this woe less hateful to the sun—

And that pure soul had found its Master thus

To listen to, remember, watch and love,

And trust the dawn that rose up through the dark:

O this was good

For me to see, as for some weary hopeless

Longer and toiler for "the Kingdom of Heaven"

To stand some lifeless twilight hour, and hear,

There in the dim-lit house of Lazarus,

Mary who said: "Thus, thus, he looked, he spake,

The Master!"—So to hear her rapturous words,

And gaze upon her up-raised heavenly face!

WILLIAM WALLACE.

(For the Ballarat statue of him.)

This is Scotch William Wallace. It was he

Who in dark hours first raised his face to see:

Who watched the English tyrant nobles spurn,

Steel-clad, with iron hoofs the Scottish free:

Who armed and drilled the simple footman Kern,

Yea, bade in blood and rout the proud Knight learn

His Feudalism was dead, and Scotland stand

Dauntless to wait the day of Bannockburn!

O Wallace, peerless lover of thy land,

We need thee still, thy moulding brain and hand!

For us, thy poor, again proud tyrants spurn,

The robber rich, a yet more hateful band!

THE AUSTRALIAN FLAG.

Pure blue flag of heaven

With your silver stars,

Not beside those crosses’

Blood-stained torture-bars:

Not beside the token

The foul sea-harlot gave,

Pure blue flag of heaven,

Must you ever wave!

No, but young exultant,

Free from care and crime,

The soulless selfish England

Of this later time:

No, but, faithful, noble,

Rising from her grave,

Flag of light and liberty,

For ever must you wave!

TO AN OLD FRIEND IN ENGLAND.

"esau."

Was it for nothing in the years gone by,

O my love, O my friend,

You thrilled me with your noble words of faith?—

Hope beyond life, and love, love beyond death!

Yet now I shudder, and yet you did not die,

O my friend, O my love!

Was it for nothing in the dear dead years,

O my love, O my friend,

I kissed you when you wrung my heart from me,

And gave my stubborn hand where trust might be?

Yet then I smiled, and see, these bitter tears,

O my friend, O my love!

No bitter words to say to you have I,

O my love, O my friend!

That faith, that hope, that love was mine, not yours!

And yet that kiss, that clasp endures, endures.

I have no bitter words to say. Good-bye,

O my friend, O my love!

AT THE SEAMEN’S UNION. [84]

"the seamen and the miners."

. . . One rises now and speaks: "The Cause is one—

Labour o’er all the earth! Shan’t we, then, share

With these, whose very flesh and blood’s our own,

All that we can of what we have and are?

"What is it that their work is in the earth,

Down in its depths, and ours is on the sea?

The fight they fight is ours; their worth our worth;

Their loss our loss. We help them! They are we!

"We help them!—Ay, and when our hour too breaks,

And on to every ship that ploughs the wave

We put our hand at last, our hand that takes

Its own, will they forget the help we gave?

"And, if our robber lords would rob us still

With the foul hoard of beasts without a soul,

They may find leprous hands to work their will,

But, for their ships, where will they find the coal?"

"Help them!" the voices cry. They help them. Here,

Resolute, stern, menacing, hark the sound!

Look, ’tis the simple fearlessness of fear—

Dark faces and deep voices all around.

TO HIS LOVE.

"Teach me, love, to be true;

Teach me, love, to love;

Teach me to be pure like you.

It will be more than enough!

"Ah, and in days to come,

Give me, my seraph, too,

A son nobler than I,

A daughter true like you:

"A son to battle the wrong,

To seek and strive for the right;

A beautiful daughter of song,

To point us on to the light!"

HER POEM:

"my baby girl, that was born and died on the same day."

"Ah, with torn heart I see them still,

Wee unused clothes and empty cot.

Though glad my love has missed the ill

That falls to woman’s lot.

"No tangled paths for her to tread

Throughout the coming changeful years;

No desperate weird to dree and dread;

No bitter lonely tears!

"No woman’s piercing crown of thorns

Will press my aching baby’s brow;

No starless nights, no sunless morns,

Will ever greet her now.

"The clothes that I had wrought with care

Through weary hours for love’s sweet sake

Are laid aside, and with them there

A heart that seemed to break."

TO HENRY GEORGE IN AMERICA.

Not for the thought that burns on keen and clear,

Heat that the heat has turned from red to white,

The passion of the lone remembering night

One with the patience day must see and hear—

Not for the shafts the lying foemen fear,

Shot from the soul’s intense self-centring light—

But for the heart of love divine and bright,

We praise you, worker, thinker, poet, seer!

Man of the People,—faithful in all parts,

The veins’ last drop, the brain’s last flickering dole,

You on whose forehead beams the aureole

That hope and "certain hope" alone imparts—

Us have you given your perfect heart and soul;

Wherefore receive as yours our souls and hearts!

"ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE."

Shrieks out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire

That is not quenched but hath for only fruit

What writhes and dies not in its rotten root:

Two things made flesh, the visible desire

To match in filth the skunk, the ape in ire, [87a]

Mouthing before the mirrors with wild foot

Beyond all feebler footprint of pursuit,

The perfect twanger of the Chinese lyre!

A heart with generous virtues run to seed

In vices making all a jumbled creed:

A soul that knows not love nor trust nor shame,

But cuts itself with knives to bawl and bleed—

If thou we’ve known of late, art still the same,

What need, O soul, to sign thee with thy name?

Once on thy lips the golden-honeyed bees

Settling made sweet the heart that was not strong,

And sky and earth and sea burst into song: [87b]

Once on thine eyes the light of agonies

Flashed through the soul and robbed the days of ease. [87c]

But tunes turn stale when love turns babe, and long

The exiled gentlemen grow fat with wrong.

And peasants, workmen, beggars, what are these? [87d]

O you who sang the Italian smoke above,—

Mud-lark of Freedom, pipe of that vile band

Whose envy slays the tyrant, not the love

Of these poor souls none have the keeping of—

It is your hand—it is your pandar hand

Smites the bruised mouth of pilloried Ireland!

TO AN UNIONIST.

"If you only knew

How gladly I’ve given it

All these years—

The light of mine eyes,

The heat of my lips,

Mine agonies,

My yearning tears,

My blood that drips,

My brain that sears:

If you only knew

How gladly I’ve given it

All these years—

My hope and my youth,

My manhood, my Art,

My passion, my truth,

My mind and my heart:

"O my brother, you would not say,

What have you to do with me?

You would not, would not turn away

Doubtingly and bitterly.

"If you only knew

How little I cared for

These other things—

The delicate speech,

The high demand

Of each from each,

The imaginings

Of Love’s Holy Land:

If you only knew

How little I cared for

These other things—

The wide clear view

Over peoples and times,

The search in the new

Entrancing climes,

Science’s wings

And Art’s sweet chimes:

"O my brother, if you only knew

What to me in these things is understood,

As it seems to me it would seem to you,

What was good for the Cause was surely good:

"O my brother, you would not say:

What have you to do with me?

You would not, would not turn away

Doubtingly and bitterly:

"But you would take my hand with your hand,

O my brother, if you only knew;

You would smile at me, you would understand,

You would call me brother as I call you!"

TO MY FRIEND SYDNEY JEPHCOTT,

with a copy of my "poetical works."

"Take with all my heart, friend, this,

The labour of my past,

Though the heart here hidden is

And the soul’s eternities

Hold the present fast.

"Take it, still, with soul and heart,

Pledge of that dear day

When the shadows stir and start,

By the bright Sun burst apart—

Young Australia!"

TO E. L. ZOX. [89]

(Melbourne.)

We thank you for a noble work well done.

There is a kindness—(’tis the truer one;

The better part the simpler heart doth know),

The care to give the day a brighter sun

To these, the nameless crowd that drags on slow

The common toil, the common weary woe

The world cares nought for. But your work secures

Thro’ union strength and self-respect that grow.

There is a courage that unflawed endures

The sneer, the slander of earth’s epicures.

And here are grateful women’s hearts to show

This kindness and this courage, both are yours!

"FATHER ABE."

(Song of the American Sons of Labour.)

THE SONG.

"O we knew so well, dear Father,

When we answered to your call,

And the Southern Moloch stricken

Shook and tottered to his fall—

"O we knew so well you loved us,

And our hearts beat back to yours

With the rapturous adoration

That through all the years endures!

"Mothers, sisters bade us hasten

Sweethearts, wives with babe at breast;

For the Union, faith and freedom,

For our hero of the West!

"And we wrung forth victory blood-stained

From the desperate hands of Crime,

And our Cause blazed out Man’s beacon

Through the endless future time!

"And forgiven, forever we bade it

Cease, that envy, hatred, strife,

As he willed, our murdered Father

That had sealed his love with life!

"O dear Father, was it thus, then?

Did we this but in a dream?

Is it real, hideous present?

Does our suffering only seem?

"Bend and listen, look and tell us!

Are these joyless toilers We?

Slaves more wretched, patient, piteous

Than the slaves we fought to free!

"Are these weak, worn girls and women

Those whose mothers yet can tell

How they kissed and clasped men god-like

With fierce faces fronting hell?

"Bend and listen, look and tell us!

Is this silent waste, possessed

By bloat thieves and their task-masters,

Thy free, thy fair, thy fearless West?

"Are these Eastern mobs of wage-slaves,

Are these cringing debauchees,

Sons of those who slung their rifles—

Shook the old Flag to the breeze?"

THE ANSWER.

"Men and boys, O fathers, brothers,

Burst these fetters round you bound!

Women, sisters, wives and mothers,

Lift your faces from the ground!

"O Democracy, O People,

East and West and North and South,

Rise together, one for ever,

Strike this Crime upon the mouth!

"Bid them not, the men who loved you,

Those who fought for you and died,

Scorn you that you broke a small Crime,

Left a great Crime pass in pride!

"England, France, the played-out countries,

Let them reek there in their stew,

Let their past rot out their present,

But the Future is with you!

"O America, O first-born

Of the age that yet shall be

Where all men shall be as one man,

Noble, faithful, fearless, free!—

"O America, O paramour

Of the foul slave-owner Pelf,

You who saved from slavery others,

Now from slavery save yourself!

"Save yourself, though, anguish-shaken,

You cry out and bow your head,

Crying ‘Why am I forsaken?’

Crying ‘It is finishèd!’

"Save yourself, no God will save you;

Not one angel can He give!

They and He are dead and vanished,

And ’tis you, ’tis you must live!

"Risen again, fire-tried, victorious,

From the grave of Crime down-hurled,

Peerless, pure, serene and glorious,

Wield the sceptre of the world!"

A FOOL.

(Brisbane).

He asked me of my friend—"a clever man;

Such various talent, business, journalism;

A pen that might some day have sent out ‘leaders’

From our greatest newspapers."—"Yes, all this,

All this," I said.—"And yet he will not rise?

He’ll stay a "comp.," a printer all his life?"—

I said: "Just that, a workman all his life."

But, as my questioner was a business man,

One of the sons of Capital, a sage

Whose practicality saw I can suppose

Quite to his nose-tip even his finger-ends,

I vouchsafed explanation. "This young man

My friend, was born and bred a workman. All

His heart and soul (And men have hearts and souls

Other than those the doctor proses of,

The parson prates of, and both make their trade)

Were centred in his comradeship and love.

His friends, his ‘chums’, were workmen, and the girl

He wooed, and made a happy wife and mother,

Had heart and soul like him in whence she sprung.

Observe now! When he came to think and read,

He saw (it seemed to him he saw) in what

Capitalists, Employers, men like you,

Think and call ‘justice’ in your inter-dealings,

Some slight mistakes (I fancy he’d say ‘wrongs’)

Whereby his order suffered. So he wonders:

‘Cannot we change this?’ And he tries and tries,

Knowing his fellows and adapting all

His effort in the channels that they know.

You understand? He’s ‘only an Unionist!’

Now for the second point. This man believes

That these mistakes—these wrongs (we’ll pass the word)

Spring from a certain thing called ‘competition’

Which you (and I) know is a God-given thing

Whereby the fittest get up to the top

(That’s I—or you) and tread down all the others.

Well, this man sees how by this God-given thing

He has the chance to use his extra wits

And clamber up: he sees how others have—

(Like you—or me; my father’s father’s father

Was a market-gardener and, I trust, a good one).

He sees, moreover, how perpetually

Each of his fellows who has extra wits

Has used them as the fox fallen in the well

Used the confiding goat, and how the goats

More and more wallow there and stupefy,

Robbed of the little wit the hapless crowd

Had in their general haplessness. Well, then

This man of mine (This is against all law,

Human, divine and natural, I admit)

Prefers to wallow there and not get out,

Except they all can! I’ve made quite a tale

About what is quite simple. Yet ’tis curious,

As I see you hold. Now frankly tell me, will you,

What do you think of him?"—"He is a fool!"—

"He is a fool? There is no doubt of it!

But I am told that it was some such fool

Came once from Galilee, and ended on

A criminal’s cross outside Jerusalem,—

And that this fool, he and his criminal’s cross,

Broke up an Empire that seemed adamant,

And made a new world which, renewed again,

Is Europe still.

He is a fool! And it was some such fool

Drudged up and down the earth these later years,

And wrote a Book the other fools bought up

In tens of thousands, calling it a Gospel.

And this fool too, and the fools that follow him,

Or hold with him, why, he and they shall all

End in the mad-house, or the gutter, where

They’ll chew the husk of their mad dreams, and die!

For what are their follies but dreams? They have done nothing,

And never will! . . .

One moment! I have just a word to say.

How comes it, tell me, friend, six weeks ago

A ‘comp.’ was sent a-packing for a cause

His fellows thought unjust, and that same night

(Or, rather, the next morning) in comes one

To tell you (quite politely) that unless

That ‘comp.’ was setting at his frame, they feared

One of our greatest newspapers would not go

That day a harbinger of light and leading

To gladden and instruct its thousands? And,

If I remember right, it did—and so did he,

That wretched ‘comp.,’ set at his frame, and does!

How came it also that three months ago

Your brother, the shipowner, "sacked" a man

Out of his ship, and bade him go to hell?

And in the evening up came two or three,

Discreetly asking him to state the cause?

And when he said he’d see them with the other,

(Videlicet, in hell), they said they feared,

Unless the other came thence (if he was there),

And was upon his ship to-morrow morning,

It would not sail. It did not sail till noon,

And he sailed with it!

But this is all beside the point! Our ‘comp.,’

Who sweats there, and who will not write you ‘leaders’

Except to help a friend who’s fallen ill,

Why, he, beyond a doubt he is a fool!"

"MOUNT RENNIE." [95]

I.

(The Australian Press speaks).

"Kill them! Yes, hang them all!

They are fiends, just that!

And we’re all agreed fiends should be sent

To a place that’s hot.

"They were fiends, too, of themselves;

They delighted in it!

It’s all their fault, their own fault!

Don’t listen a minute!

"Don’t let anyone talk

About ‘fatality,’ ‘lot,’

That sort of talk (excuse us!)

Is just damned rot.

"You and I, p’raps, are what we’re made.

If I’m dying of phthisis,

It’s because my father passed on

To me what the price is

"Of his excesses, and I,

Overworked, come off worse.

Just so; but, with these young fiends,

It’s quite the reverse.

"Their homes were happy and bright,

(All are in Australia).

Their parents were good, kind, wise:

No breath of failure

"Can be breathed on their education,

Their childhood’s surroundings,

The healthy training that gives

Youth morality’s groundings.

"Those people who say

That the larrikins come

From that God-spat-out-thing,

The Australian ‘home’—

"The narrow harsh rule

Of base mean parents,

Whose played-out ideas drive

All of good and of fair thence:

"That our prostitute girls

Come from just the same Cause—

Why, these idiots know nothing

Of facts, social laws!

"Kill them, then! Hang them all!

We (like God) must be just.

It was all their own faults,

Not ours. . . . Dust to dust!"

II.

(The Time-Spirit speaks.)

"Poor lads! And you for others’ wrongs and sins

Whose dead past greed and lust did never wince

To make your fathers, mothers, and now you

Miserable fiends in hell, must expiate, since

"We the more guilty, we the strong, the few,

Whose triumph thrusts you down into the stew,

Fear lest our victims rise and rend us, fear

This problem mad we will not listen to!

"Victims, with her your fellow-victim here,

Blind, deaf, dumb beasts, the hour shall yet appear

When men, when justicers resolute-terrible, you

Shall speak and all men tremble as they hear!"

"TYRANNY."

(Melbourne.)

[The Delegates speak.]

"‘Tyranny’? Yes, that’s it!

We are not afraid

To face the word that’s fit

For what we’ve said!

"It’s the tyranny of the Many,

That will not allow

There’s the right to any

To seek wealth and power now

"At the expense of the Many.

Say, that one or this

Works ‘over hours’: then he

Drives us all to the abyss,

"Where, struggling together

One rises again

While the rest all together

Are stifled and slain.

"From this death-strife of brothers

Comes the tyranny of One.

That’s your sort. But we others,

We prefer our own!"

FROM A VERANDAH.

(Sydney.)

"Armageddon."

O city lapped in sun and Sabbath rest,

With happy face of plenteous ease possessed,

Have you no doubts that whisper, dreams that moan

Disquietude, to stir your slumbering breast?

Think you the sins of other climes are gone?

The harlot’s curse rings in your streets—the groan

Of out-worn men, the stabbed and plundered slaves

Of ever-growing Greed, these are your own!

O’er you shall sweep the fiery hell that craves

For quenchment the bright blood of human waves:

For you, if you repent not, shall atone

For Greed’s dark death-holes with War’s swarming graves!

"ELSIE:"

A Memory.

Little elfin maid,

Old, though scarce two years,

With your big dark hazel eyes

Tenderer than tears,

And your rosebud mouth

Lisping jocund things,

Breaking brooding silence with

Wistful questionings!

Like a flower you grew

While life’s bright sun shone.

Does the greedy spendthrift earth

Heed a flower is gone?

No; but Love’s fond ken,

That gropes through Death’s strange ways,

Almost seems to hear your Voice,

Seems to see your Face!

"NATIONALISM AND M‘ILWRAITH!"

The Queensland Elections Cry, 1888.

Australia listened! Through the brawling game

Of played-out rascals gambling for her gold,

The rotten-hearted traitors who had sold

For flimsy English gauds her righteous fame—

Through the foul hubbub, it did seem, there came

The still small voice of nobler things untold.

But now, but now with wonder manifold

She hears a voice that calls her by her name!

Australia listens, as the mother wilt

To hear her first-born cry. "Say, is it death,

Or life and all life’s hope made audible

That thrills my heart and gives my spirit faith?"

From out the gathering war-hosts leaps forth shrill

The double cry, "Australia, M‘Ilwraith!"

The dawn is breaking northward! Rise, O Sun,

Australian Liberty, and give us light!

And thou who through the dark and doubtful night

With great clear eyes of patience looking on

Even to that splendid hour Republican,

O know what things are with thee in the fight—

What hope and trust, what truth, what right, what might

To never leave this work till it be done!

Not as these others were, the helpless slaves

Of each diurnal need and cringing debt,

Australia’s statesman, have we known thee yet!—

The world’s great heroes call from a thousand graves:

"Thy land, a nation, cries to thee to be set

Free as the freedom of her ocean waves!"

TO THE EMPEROR WILLIAM.

London, May 15, 1889.—"The promised interview with the Emperor

William was granted to-day to the delegates from the coal-miners

now on strike in Westphalia; but the audience lasted for only ten

minutes. The men asked that the Emperor would inquire into the

merits of their case and the hardships under which they suffered.

His Majesty replied that he was already inquiring into the matter.

He then warned the miners that he would employ all his great

powers to repress socialistic agitation and intrigue. If the slightest

resistance was shown he would shoot every man so offending. On

the other hand, he promised to protect them if peaceable."—

Cablegram.

Son of a Man and grandson of a Man,

Mannikin most miserable in thy shrunken shape

And peevish, shrivelled-soul, is’t thou wouldst ape

The thunder-bearer of Fate’s blustering clan?

Know, then, that never, since the years began,

The terrible truth was surer of this word:

"Who takes the sword, shall perish by the sword!"

For mankind’s nod makes mannikin and man.

Surely it was not shed too long ago,

That Emperor’s blood that stained the Northern snow,

O thou King Stork aspiring that art King Log,

Wild-boar that wouldst be, reeking there all hog;

To teach thy brutish brainlessness to know

Those who pulled down a lion can shoot a dog.

A STORY.

(For the Irish Delegates in Australia.)

Do you want to hear a story

With a nobler praise than "glory,"

Of a man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong

like hell?

Then, that story let me tell you

Once again, though it as well you

Know as I—the splendid story of the man they call Parnell!

By the wayside of the nations,

Lashed with whips and execrations,

Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying, she, the Maiden Nation, lay;

And the burthen of dishonour

Weighed so grievously upon her

That her very children hid their eyes and crept in shame away.

And there as she was lying

Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying,

All her high-born foes came round her, fleering, jeering, as they

said:

"What is freedom fought and won for?

She is dead! She’s down and done for!"

And her weeping children shuddered as they crouched and

whispered: "Dead!"

Then suddenly up-starting,

All that throng before him parting,

See, a man with firm step breaking through that central knot that

gives;

And, as by some dear lost sister,

He knelt down, and softly kissed her,

And he raised his pale, proud face, and cried: "She is not dead. She

lives!

"O she lives, I say, and I here,

I am come to fight and die here

For the love my heart has for her like a slow consuming fire;

For the love of her low lying,

For the hatred deep, undying

Of the robber lords who struck and stabbed and trod her in the

mire!"

Then upon that cry bewildering,

Some of them, her hapless children—

In their hearts there leaped up hope like light when night gives birth

to day;

And, as mocks and threats defied him,

One by one they came beside him,

Till they stood, a band of heroes, sombre, desperate, at bay!

And the battle that they fought there,

And the bitter truth they taught there

To the blinded Sister-Nation suffering grievously alway,

All the wrong and rapine past hers,

Of her lords and her task masters,

Is not this the larger hope of all as night gives birth to day!

For the lords and liars are quaking

At the People’s stern awaking

From their slumber of the ages; and the Peoples slowly rise,

And with hands locked tight together,

One in heart and soul for ever,

Watch the sun of Light and Liberty leap up into the skies!

That’s the story, that’s the story

With a nobler praise than "glory,"

Of the Man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong

like hell,

And with calm, proud exultation

Bade her stand at last a nation,

Ireland, Ireland that is one name with the name of Charles Parnell!

AT THE INDIA DOCKS.

A Memory of August, 1883.

[The spectacle of the life of the London Dock labourers is one of the

most terrible examples of the logical outcome of the present social

system. In the six great metropolitan docks over 100,000 men are

employed, the great bulk of whom are married and have families.

By the elaborate system of sub-contracts their wages have been

driven down to 4d., 3d., and even 2d. for the few hours they are

employed, making the average weekly earnings of a man amount to

7, 6, and even 5 shillings a week! Hundreds and hundreds of lives

are lost or ruined every year by the perilous nature of the work, and

absolutely without compensation. Yet so fierce is the competition

that men are not unfrequently maimed or even killed in the

desperate struggles at the gates for the tickets of employment,

guaranteeing a "pay" which often does not amount to more than a

few pence! The streets and houses inhabited by this unfortunate

class are of the lowest kind—haunts of vice, disease, and death, and

the monopolistic companies are thus directly able to profit by their

wholesale demoralization by ruthlessly crushing out, through the

contractors, all efforts at organisation on the part of the men. To see

these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine,

British Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers,

and sailors the first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes

by what means the colossal work of loading and unloading them is

carried out; this is to face a sacrificial orgy of human life—

childhood, youth, manhood, womanhood, and age, with everything

that makes them beautiful and ennobling, and not merely a misery

and a curse—far more appalling than any Juggernaut progress or

the human holocausts that were offered up to Moloch.]

I stood in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flow

Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth

and Woe;

And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with

desperate grief,

And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no

relief.

For never a moment—no; not one—through all the dreary day,

And thro’ all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stay

Of the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,

As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me

mad.

And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless,

stood,

And the river’s exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,

Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent

drain

That carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain—

There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city’s light,

A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,

Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shape

Of that thundering great Machinery from which there was no

escape.

It stood there high in the heavens, fronting the face of God,

And the spray it sprinkled had blasted the green and flowery sod

All round where, through stony precincts, its Cyclopean pillars fell

To its adamantine foundations that were fixed in the womb of hell.

And the birds that, wild and whirling, and moth-like, flew to its

glare

Were struck by the flying wheel-spokes, and maimed and murdered

there;

And the dust that swept about its black panoply overhead,

And the din of it seemed to shatter and scatter the sheeted dead.

But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible

den,

And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and

men,

Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see,

From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came

perpetually—

Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some

cursing, some crying,

Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the

dead and the dying

Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath

That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of

death.

Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain,

And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain—

How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood,

And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood.

And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit,

And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth

of it

In the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel’s devouring breath

That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of

death.

And once again as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on,

I saw the shape of the Idol like a king turned carrion,

Yet crowned and more terrific thus for his human fleshly loss,

And with one clenched hand he brandished a lash, and the other

held up a cross!

And all around the Altar were seated, joyous and free,

In garments richly-coloured and choice, a goodly company,

Eating and drinking and wantoning, like gods that scorned to know

Of the thundering great Machinery and the crowds and the Pit

below.

Ah, Christ! the sights and the sounds there that every hour befell

Would wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell,

But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease—

Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease;

Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;

Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to

death in the mire;

Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have

been,

Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous

Machine!

And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight,

At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of

might,

When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise,

Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies.

But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say,

For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day.

But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel,

The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence

fell.

Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an

eye—

A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry:

"Enough, enough! It has had enough! We will march no more till

we drop

In the furnace Pit. Give us food! Give us rest! Though the accursed

Machinery stop!"

And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their

feet,

And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet.

And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod.

And "Stop the Machinery!" he yelled, "you might as well stop

God!"

But the terrible thunder-cry replied: "If this indeed must be,

It is you should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine—not

we!"

And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight,

And all the ærial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of

might,

And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overhead

The great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge,

blood-red!

But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see

or know,

Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flow

Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth

and Woe!

DIRGE.

(Brisbane.)

"A little Soldier of the Army of the Night."

Bury him without a word!

No appeal to death;

Only the call of the bird

And the blind spring’s breath.

Nature slays ten, yet the one

Reaches but to a part

Of what’s to be done, to be sung.

Keep we a proud heart!

Let us not glose her waste

With lies and dreams;

Fawn on her wanton haste,

Say it but seems.

Comrades, with faces unstirred,

Scorning grief’s dole,

Though with him, with him lies interred

Our heart and soul,

Bury him without a word!

No appeal to death;

Only the call of the bird

And the blind spring’s breath.

TO QUEEN VICTORIA IN ENGLAND.

an address on her jubilee year.

Madam, you have done well! Let others with praise unholy,

Speech addressed to a woman who never breathed upon earth,

Daub you over with lies or deafen your ears with folly,

I will praise you alone for your actual imminent worth.

Madam, you have done well! Fifty years unforgotten

Pass since we saw you first, a maiden simple and pure.

Now when every robber landlord, capitalist rotten,

Hated oppressors, praise you—Madam, we are quite sure!

Never once as a foe, open foe, to the popular power,

As nobler kings and queens, have you faced us, fearless and bold:

No, but in backstairs fashion, in the stealthy twilight hour,

You have struggled and struck and stabbed, you have bartered and

bought and sold!

Melbourne, the listless liar, the gentleman blood-beslavered,

Disraeli, the faithless priest of a cynical faith out-worn,

These were dear to your heart, these were the men you favoured.

Those whom the People loved were fooled and flouted and torn!

Never in one true cause, for your people’s sake and the light’s sake,

Did you strike one honest blow, did you speak one noble word:

No, but you took your place, for the sake of wrong and the night’s

sake,

Ever with blear-eyed wealth, with the greasy respectable herd.

Not as some robber king, with a resolute minister slave to you, [110]

Did you swagger with force against us to satisfy your greed:

No, but you hoarded and hid what your loyal people gave to you,

Golden sweat of their toil, to keep you a queen indeed!

Pure at least was your bed? pure was your Court?—We know not.

Were the white sepulchres pure? Gather men thorns of grapes?

Your sons and your blameless spouse’s, certes, as Galahads show

not.

Round you gather a crowd of bloated hypocrite shapes!

Never, sure, did one woman produce in such sixes and dozens

Such intellectual canaille as this that springs from you;

Sons, daughters, grandchildren, with uncles, aunts, and cousins,

Not a man or a woman among them—a wretched crew!

Madam, you have done well! You have fed all these to repletion—

You have put a gilded calf beside a gilded cow,

And bidden men and women behold the forms of human

completion—

Albert the Good, Victoria the Virtuous, for ever—and now!

But what to you were our bravest and best, man of science and poet,

Struggling for Light and Truth, or the Women who would be free?

Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Arnold? We know it—

Tennyson slavers your hand; Argyll fawns at your knee!

Good, you were good, we say. You had no wit to be evil.

Your purity shines serene over Floras mangled and dead.

You wasted not our substance in splendour, in riot or revel—

You quietly sat in the shade and grew fat on our wealth instead.

Madam, you have done well! To you, we say, has been given

A wit past the wit of women, a supercomputable worth.

Of you we can say, if not "of such are the Kingdom of Heaven,"

Of such (alas for us!), of such are the Kingdom of Earth!

FAREWELL TO THE CHILDREN.

In the early summer morning

I stand and watch them come,

The children to the school-house;

They chatter and laugh and hum.

The little boys with satchels

Slung round them, and the girls

Each with hers swinging in her hand;

I love their sunny curls.

I love to see them playing,

Romping and shouting with glee,

The boys and girls together,

Simple, fearless, free.

I love to see them marching

In squads, in file, in line,

Advancing and retreating,

Tramping, keeping time.

Sometimes a little lad

With a bright brave face I’ll see,

And a wistful yearning wonder

Comes stealing over me.

For once I too had a darling;

I dreamed what he should do,

And surely he’d have had, I thought,

Just such a face as you.

And I, I dreamed to see him

Noble and brave and strong,

Loving the light, the lovely,

Hating the dark, the wrong,—

Loving the poor, the People,

Ready to smile and give

Blood and brain to their service,

For them to die or live!

No matter, O little darlings!

Little boys, you shall be

My citizens for faithful labour,

My soldiers for victory!

Little girls, I charge you

Be noble sweethearts, wives,

Mothers—comrades the sweetest,

Fountains of happy lives!

Farewell, O little darlings!

Far away,—with strangers, too—

He sleeps, the little darling,

I dreamed to see like you.

And I, O little darlings,

I have many miles to go,

And where I too may stop and sleep,

And when, I do not know.

But I charge you to remember

The love, the trust I had,

That you’d be noble, fearless, free,

And make your country glad!

That you should toil together,

Face whatever yet shall be,

My citizens for faithful labour,

My soldiers for victory!

I charge you to remember;

I bless you with my hand,

And I know the hour is coming

When you shall understand:

When you shall understand too,

Why, as I said farewell,

Although my lips were smiling,

The shining tears down fell.

EPODE.

"On the Ranges, Queensland."

Beyond the night, down o’er the labouring East,

I see light’s harbinger of dawn released:

Upon the false gleam of the ante-dawn,

Lo, the fair heaven of day-pursuing morn!

Beyond the lampless sleep and perishing death

That hold my heart, I feel my new life’s breath,

I see the face my spirit-shape shall have

When this frail clay and dust have fled the grave.

Beyond the night, the death of doubt, defeat,

Rise dawn and morn, and life with light doth meet,

For the great Cause, too,—sure as the sun yon ray

Shoots up to strike the threatening clouds and say;

"I come, and with me comes the victorious Day!"

When I was young, the muse I worshipped took me,

Fearless, a lonely heart, to look on men.

"’Tis yours," said she, "to paint this show of them

Even as they are!" Then smiling she forsook me.

Wherefore with passionate patience I withdrew,

With eyes from which all loves, hates, hopes, and fears,

Joys aureole, and the blinding sheen of tears,

Were purged away. And what I saw I drew.

Then, as I worked remote, serene, alone,

A child-girl came to me and touched my cheek,

And lo her lips were pale, her limbs were weak,

Her eyes had thirst’s desire and hunger’s moan.

She said: "I am the soul of this sad day

Where thousands toil and suffer hideous Crime,

Where units rob and mock the empty time

With revel and rank prayer and deaths display!"

I said: "O child, how shall I leave my songs,

My songs and tales, the warp and subtle woof

Of this great work and web, in your behoof

To strive and passionately sing of wrongs?

"Child, is it nothing that I here fulfil

My heart and soul? that I may look and see

Where Homer bends and Shakspere smiles on me,

And Goethe praises the unswerving will?"

She hung her head, and straight, without a word,

Passed from me. And I raised my conscious face

To where, in beauteous power in her place,

She stood, the muse, my muse, and watched and heard.

Her proud and marble brow was faintly flushed;

Upon her flawless lips, and in her eyes

A mild light flickered as the young sunrise,

Glad, sacred, terrible, serene and hushed.

Then I cried out, and rose with pure wrath wild,

Desperate with hatred of Fate’s slavery

And this cold cruel demon. With that cry,

I left her, and sought out the piteous child.

"Darling, ’tis nothing that I shed and weep

These tears of fire that wither all the heart,

These bloody sweats that drain and sear and smart,

I love you, and you’ll kiss me when I sleep!"

The End.

AUSTRALIAN PRESS NOTICES.

"This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power,

inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of

verse that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of

course, excepting the complete ‘Poetical Works’ of the same author).

That is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of passion,

pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable

out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the misery and

hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,

This putrid death,

This flesh-feast of the few,

This social structure of red mud,

This edifice of slime,

Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood,

Whose pinnacle is crime!

Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the

quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined

forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell ‘of our

own manufacture,’ whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old

village by the Thames—(trade mark, ‘Commerce and Christ.’)"—

Sydney Jephcott, "Australian Standard."

AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

"Francis Adams is about the least Australian of the Australian poets.

There is in his work lack of wattle-bloom and waratah, rollicking

rhyme and galloping jingle. There is much of old-world problems

and old-world troubles, which are old-world simply because we

here have not had time enough to breed the fever germ to a

ravaging pestilence. We have, however, the fever germ, and Francis

Adams does our young country yeoman service in awakening a fear

for the future in his latest book of poems, ‘Songs of the Army of the

Night.’ The book is not all night though. It is a cantata without music. The first part is all gloom; angry threatening clouds bar out

the light of the coming dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen

plash along in the mud and darkness; the lightning of angry steel,

gleaming phosphorescent in the night; the hoarse hum of famished

millions moiling along with a dim yearning for a bloody vengeance,

contribute the details of a grim picture of realistic misery. The first

part deserves the title given to the whole book, ‘Songs of the Army

of the Night.’ The third part is perturbed and stormy, the sea

heaving and surging after a tempest; but already the day is

breaking, and young hope is felt in the warmth of the sun’s first

rays. The third part might be justly termed ‘Songs of the Dawn.’

The second part is hot and heavy with the languorous heat of the

tropics. . . . The whole book is a hymn in praise of fodder. The people march hungry, hoarse with lack of sustenance, gripping their

firelocks with feverish, skeleton hands, glaring fiercely with

famished eyes towards the granaries of the wealthy. . . . This is the

sermon of Nature: ‘If you would be good, eat.’ It is in the first part

that we hear the trumpet-blast of the social message. Here the

verses throb with a realistic agony, a lyric Zolaism, that chains the

eyes to the page with a virile fascination. It is so simple, too—the

coarse, strong meat of the poetry of first principles. The lines are hot

and fervid; the poet’s pulses keep time with the great heart of

human woe. This is socialism in verse, anarchism in the guise of a

Grecian statue. ‘Outside London’ breathes thick and heavy with the

vapours of gutterdom. It is despair, hunger, prophecy, hate,

revenge. Francis Adams, a ripe and true scholar, in this shows his

devotion to truth and to art. The traditions of classicism are in this

volume thrown to the winds. The poet’s muse is a glorified street

trull, a Cassandra of the slums, a draggle-tailed Menad from

Whitechapel, and her voice is thick and frenzied with shouting at

the barricades. ‘The Evening Hymn in the Hovels,’ ‘Hagar,’ ‘To the

Girls of the Unions,’ ‘In the Edgware Road,’ ‘In Trafalgar Square,’

‘Aux Ternes,’ ‘One among so many,’ ‘The New Locksley Hall,’ ‘To

the Christians,’ voice in passionate, simple people’s lyrics the

socialism which is always felt in strong under-currents by a nation

before it appears in literary form, but which is only on the eve of

bursting forth and overwhelming everything with its fury, when it

does appear in literary form. Rosseau, Voltaire, and Diderot

ushered in the French Revolution; in similar fashion the English

Revolution is heralded by William Morris and Francis Adams."—F.

J. Broomfield, Sydney Bulletin.

"DAWNWARDS?"

To the Author of the "Songs of the Army of the Night."

We—who, encircled in sleepless sadness

With ears laid close to the Austral earth,

Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness,

Of hopeless anguish and murd’rous mirth

Beneath all noise of maudlin gladness

Awail, environ the world’s wide girth—

Almost arise with Hope’s keen urging

When out the vasty and night-bound North

Red rays ascend, and Songs resurging

Through all the darkness and chill, come forth!

The comet climbs until it scorches

The sacred dais that skies the great,

Until it gleams on palace porches,

Where blissful æons-to-be hold state—

Fades, and we know it one of the torches

Madmen a moment elevate!

And, closer clutching the earth, our sorrow

Doth then with desperate murmur cry,

"We ne’er shall see or morn or morrow!

For never star doth scale the sky,

"All men made wise through midnight sable

To lead where, safe after all annoy,

Sleep soft in earth’s Augean stable

The virgin "Justice," the infant "Joy!"—

Grant this, O Father, being able,

Or else in merciful might destroy

"This orb whose past and present, awful

Alike, attest it a torture wheel,

Where, bound by holy men and lawful,

Man’s body’s broken with bars of steel!"

But when we pause, despairing wholly,

As a storm that strengthens out on the sea,

The far-flown songs come sounding slowly!

As sea-birds kindle that sweep alee

New hopes, old yearnings winging slowly

From breast to bosom for shelter flee!

And scarce we know, as there they hover

And our blood beats ’neath their beating wings,

If ’tis an old dream earthed over

Or new bird-ballad that stirs and sings!

But truth’s Tyrtæus is now our neighbour,

And strives to waken the slumbering South

With peal and throb of trump and tabour

And sobbing songs of his mournful mouth

To see where Life’s all-giver, Labour,

Lies fettered, famished and dumb with drouth.

Sydney Jephcott,

Brisbane Boomerang, 25th January 1888.