The limping lepers crawl,

The tricking traders cheat;

The lean ones cry and fall,

The fat ones curse and beat;

Never hath freedom’s cry

The stifling stillness cleaved;

The hopeless millions die

That yet have never lived.

No noble god of earth,

Man can but snatch and eat;

Starvation murders worth,

Wealth makes the beast complete.

What horror here! Is this

Thy revelation, Truth?

I shake at the abyss.

What hunger, rage, and ruth,

How hopeless! Heaven, we men

Are not the gods we think!—

Base pismires of the fen

That fight and bite and sink.

II

O myriad-childed Mother,

Sitting among their graves

Who thee and one another

Have made for ever slaves,

Great East; O aged Mother,

Too old for Fear and Hope—

Fear that is Pleasure’s brother,

And Sorrow’s sister, Hope—

As erst in ages gone,

So now, thou art half dead,

Thy countenance turned to stone

By an eternal dread.

With lips that dare not move

And awful lids apart,

While yet faint pulses prove

The life about thy heart,

Thou sitt’st at dreadful gaze

Into the dreadful Vast:

For thou canst well appraise

The future by the past,

Are these thy mighty deeds,

O Past, thy gains, O Time?

This wrack of ruin’d creeds,

This scroll or two of rhyme?—

A temple earthquake-dasht;

A false record of things;

A picture, lightning-flasht,

Of cruel eyes of kings;

A mangled race that bleeds

In cruel custom’s claws,

Besotted by their creeds,

And murder’d by their laws?

Right easily understood

Fate’s lesson is, tho’ slow;

She takes a nation’s blood

To jot a word or two.

And for sufficient space

To write a line of hers,

She wipes away a race

And dashes down the verse,

And cries, ‘So much to each,

And man may mark or not;

But what I choose to teach

Shall never be forgot.’