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. [27]

“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!

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 Phoenix 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!