“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!”