SIX SONNETS (August, 1914)

Singer of England’s ire across the sea, Your austere voice, electric from the deep, Speaks our own yearning, and our spirits sweep To Europe’s allied honor.—Painfully, Bowed with a planet’s lonely burden, we Held our hot hearts in leash, but now they leap Their ban, like young hounds belling from their keep, To bait the Teuton wolf of tyranny. What! Would he throw us sops of sugared art And poisoned commerce, snarling: “So! lie still Till I have shown my fangs, and torn the heart Of half the world, and gorged my sanguine fill!”— Now, England, let him see: Rage as he will, He cannot tear our plighted souls apart.

How shall we keep an armed neutrality With our own souls? Our souls belie our lips, That seek to hold our passion in eclipse And hide the wound of our sharp sympathy, Saying: “One’s neighbor differs; he might be Kindled to wrath, were one to wield the whips Of Truth.” Great God! A red Apocalypse Flames on the blinded world: and what do we? Peace! do we cry? Peace is the godlike plan We love and dedicate our children to; Yet England’s cause is ours: The rights of man, Which little Belgium battles for anew, Shall we recant? No!—Being American, Our souls cannot keep neutral and keep true.

Peace!—But there is no peace. To hug the thought Is but to clasp a lover who thinks lies. Go: look your earnest neighbor in the eyes And read the answer there. Peace is not bought By distance from the fight. Peace must be fought And bled for: ’tis a dream whose horrid price Is haggled for by dread realities; Peace is not paid till dreamers are distraught. Would we not close our ears against these ills, Urging our hearts: “Be calm! America Is called soon to rebuild a world.”—But ah! How shall we nobly build with neutral wills? Can we be calm while Belgian anguish thrills? Or would we crown with peace—Caligula?

Patience—but peace of heart we cannot choose; Nor would he wish us cravenly to keep Aloof in soul, who—large in statesmanship And justice—sent our ships to Vera Cruz. Patience must wring our hearts, while we refuse To launch our country on that crimson deep Which breaks the dikes of Europe, but we sleep Watchful, still waiting by the awful fuse. Wisdom he counsels, and he counsels well Whose patient fortitude against the fret And sneer of time has stood inviolable We love his goodness and will not forget. With him we pause beside the mouth of hell:— The wolf of Europe has not triumphed yet.

Crowned on the twilight battlefield, there bends A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold, Chuckling: “One hundred thousand gatlings—sold!” And the moon rises, and a moaning rends The mangled living, and the dead distends, And a child cowers on the chartless wold, Where, searching in his safety vault of mold, The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends. We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls, And dying do him homage: yea, and give Daily our living souls to be enticed Into his power. So long as on war’s walls We build engines of death that he may live, So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.

Bismarck—or rapt Beethoven with his dreams: Ah, which was blind? Or which bespoke his race?— That breed which nurtured Heine’s haunting grace, And Goethe, mastering Olympic themes Of meditation, Mozart’s golden gleams, And Leibnitz charting realms of time and space, Great-hearted Schiller, and that fairy brace Of brothers who first trailed the goblin streams. Bismarck for these builded an iron tomb, And clanged the door, and turned a kaiser’s key; And simple folk that once danced merrily Their May-ring rites, march now in roaring gloom Toward that renascent dawn when the black womb Of buried guns gives birth to Germany.