Why is it that ye grieve, O, weak in faith,
Who turn toward High Heaven upbraiding eyes?
Think ye that God will count your children’s death
Vain sacrifice?
Half-mast your flags? Nay, fly them at the head!
We reap the harvest where we sowed the corn;
See, from the red graves of your gallant dead,
An Empire born!
Do ye not know ye cannot cure a flaw
Unless the steel runs molten-red again:
That men’s mere words could not together draw
Those who were twain?
Do you not see the Anglo-Saxon breed
Grew less than kin, on every continent;
That brothers had forgotten, in their greed,
What ‘brother’ meant?
Do ye not hear from all the humming wires
Which bind the mother to each colony,
How He works surely for our best desires
To weld the free
With blood of freemen into one Grand Whole,
To open all the gates of all the Earth?
Do ye not see your Greater Britain’s soul
Has come to birth?
Do ye not hear above the sighs—the song
From all those outland hearts, which peace kept dumb:—
‘There is no fight too fierce, no trail too long,
When Love cries ‘Come!’’
Can ye beat steel from iron in the sun,
Or crown Earth’s master on a bloodless field?
As Abram offered to his God his son,
Our best we yield.
And God gives answer. In the battle smoke—
Tried in war’s crucible, washed white in tears,
The Saxon heart of Greater Britain woke,
One for all years.
Lift up your eyes! Your glory is revealed!
See, through war’s clouds, the rising of your Sun!
Hear ye God’s voice! Their testament is sealed
And ye be one!
Clive Phillipps-Wolley.
