POEMS OF WAR AND PATRIOTISM

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us; What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away?

Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye, Who watch us stepping by With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you! Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye?

Nay. We well see what we are doing, Though some may not see— Dalliers as they be— England’s need are we; Her distress would leave us rueing: Nay. We well see what we are doing, Though some may not see!

In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just, And that braggarts must Surely bite the dust, Press we to the field ungrieving, In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just.

Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us; Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away.

[He travels southward, and looks around;] I journeyed from my native spot Across the south sea shine, And found that people in hall and cot Laboured and suffered each his lot Even as I did mine.

[and cannot discern the boundary] Thus noting them in meads and marts It did not seem to me That my dear country with its hearts, Minds, yearnings, worse and better parts Had ended with the sea.

[of his native country;] I further and further went anon, As such I still surveyed, And further yet—yea, on and on, And all the men I looked upon Had heart-strings fellow-made.

[or where his duties to his fellow-creatures end;] I traced the whole terrestrial round, Homing the other side; Then said I, “What is there to bound My denizenship? It seems I have found Its scope to be world-wide.”

[nor who are his enemies] I asked me: “Whom have I to fight, And whom have I to dare, And whom to weaken, crush, and blight? My country seems to have kept in sight On my way everywhere.”

“O England, may God punish thee!” —Is it that Teuton genius flowers Only to breathe malignity Upon its friend of earlier hours? —We have eaten your bread, you have eaten ours, We have loved your burgs, your pines’ green moan, Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers; Your shining souls of deathless dowers Have won us as they were our own:

We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood, We have matched your might not rancorously, Save a flushed few whose blatant mood You heard and marked as well as we To tongue not in their country’s key; But yet you cry with face aflame, “O England, may God punish thee!” And foul in onward history, And present sight, your ancient name.

I dreamt that people from the Land of Chimes Arrived one autumn morning with their bells, To hoist them on the towers and citadels Of my own country, that the musical rhymes

Rung by them into space at meted times Amid the market’s daily stir and stress, And the night’s empty star-lit silentness, Might solace souls of this and kindred climes.

Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear; From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend,

No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood Had shattered these to shards amid the gear Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.

Seven millions stand Emaciate, in that ancient Delta-land:— We here, full-charged with our own maimed and dead, And coiled in throbbing conflicts slow and sore, Can poorly soothe these ails unmerited Of souls forlorn upon the facing shore!— Where naked, gaunt, in endless band on band Seven millions stand.

No man can say To your great country that, with scant delay, You must, perforce, ease them in their loud need: We know that nearer first your duty lies; But—is it much to ask that you let plead Your lovingkindness with you—wooing-wise— Albeit that aught you owe, and must repay, No man can say?

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,”

“Ich woll,” “Er sholl,” and by-talk similar, Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart crying: “Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

“Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly.”

“Would that I’d not drawn breath here!” some one said, “To stalk upon this stage of evil deeds, Where purposelessly month by month proceeds A play so sorely shaped and blood-bespread.”

Yet had his spark not quickened, but lain dead To the gross spectacles of this our day, And never put on the proffered cloak of clay, He had but known not things now manifested;

Life would have swirled the same. Morns would have dawned On the uprooting by the night-gun’s stroke Of what the yester noonshine brought to flower;

Brown martial brows in dying throes have wanned Despite his absence; hearts no fewer been broke By Empery’s insatiate lust of power.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

“Instigator of the ruin— Whichsoever thou mayst be Of the masterful of Europe That contrived our misery— Hear the wormwood-worded greeting From each city, shore, and lea Of thy victims: “Conqueror, all hail to thee!”

“Yea: ‘All hail!’ we grimly shout thee That wast author, fount, and head Of these wounds, whoever proven When our times are throughly read. ‘May thy loved be slighted, blighted, And forsaken,’ be it said By thy victims, ‘And thy children beg their bread!’

“Nay: a richer malediction!— Rather let this thing befall In time’s hurling and unfurling On the night when comes thy call; That compassion dew thy pillow And bedrench thy senses all For thy victims, Till death dark thee with his pall.”

Orion swung southward aslant Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant With the heather that twitched in the wind; But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these, Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow, And wondered to what he would march on the morrow.

The crazed household-clock with its whirr Rang midnight within as he stood, He heard the low sighing of her Who had striven from his birth for his good; But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze, What great thing or small thing his history would borrow From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow.

When the heath wore the robe of late summer, And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun, Hung red by the door, a quick comer Brought tidings that marching was done For him who had joined in that game overseas Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.

Often when warring for he wist not what, An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak, Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek, And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;

Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot The deed of grace amid the roar and reek; Yet larger vision than loud arms bespeak He there has reached, although he has known it not.

For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act Over the throes of artificial rage, Has thuswise muffled victory’s peal of pride, Rended to ribands policy’s specious page That deals but with evasion, code, and pact, And war’s apology wholly stultified.

When battles were fought With a chivalrous sense of Should and Ought, In spirit men said, “End we quick or dead, Honour is some reward! Let us fight fair—for our own best or worst; So, Gentlemen of the Guard, Fire first!”

In the open they stood, Man to man in his knightlihood: They would not deign To profit by a stain On the honourable rules, Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst Who in the heroic schools Was nurst.

But now, behold, what Is warfare wherein honour is not! Rama laments Its dead innocents: Herod breathes: “Sly slaughter Shall rule! Let us, by modes once called accurst, Overhead, under water, Stab first.”

Up and be doing, all who have a hand To lift, a back to bend. It must not be In times like these that vaguely linger we To air our vaunts and hopes; and leave our land

Untended as a wild of weeds and sand. —Say, then, “I come!” and go, O women and men Of palace, ploughshare, easel, counter, pen; That scareless, scathless, England still may stand.

Would years but let me stir as once I stirred At many a dawn to take the forward track, And with a stride plunged on to enterprize,

I now would speed like yester wind that whirred Through yielding pines; and serve with never a slack, So loud for promptness all around outcries!

The dead woman lay in her first night’s grave, And twilight fell from the clouds’ concave, And those she had asked to forgive forgave.

The woman passing came to a pause By the heaped white shapes of wreath and cross, And looked upon where the other was.

And as she mused there thus spoke she: “Never your countenance did I see, But you’ve been a good good friend to me!”

Rose a plaintive voice from the sod below: “O woman whose accents I do not know, What is it that makes you approve me so?”

“O dead one, ere my soldier went, I heard him saying, with warm intent, To his friend, when won by your blandishment:

“‘I would change for that lass here and now! And if I return I may break my vow To my present Love, and contrive somehow

“‘To call my own this new-found pearl, Whose eyes have the light, whose lips the curl, I always have looked for in a girl!’

“—And this is why that by ceasing to be— Though never your countenance did I see— You prove you a good good friend to me;

“And I pray each hour for your soul’s repose In gratitude for your joining those No lover will clasp when his campaigns close.”

Away she turned, when arose to her eye A martial phantom of gory dye, That said, with a thin and far-off sigh:

“O sweetheart, neither shall I clasp you, For the foe this day has pierced me through, And sent me to where she is. Adieu!—

“And forget not when the night-wind’s whine Calls over this turf where her limbs recline, That it travels on to lament by mine.”

There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground, There was a deeper gloom around.

Phantasmal fears, And the flap of the flame, And the throb of the clock, And a loosened slate, And the blind night’s drone, Which tiredly the spectral pines intone!

And the blood in my ears Strumming always the same, And the gable-cock With its fitful grate, And myself, alone.

The twelfth hour nears Hand-hid, as in shame; I undo the lock, And listen, and wait For the Young Unknown.

In the dark there careers— As if Death astride came To numb all with his knock— A horse at mad rate Over rut and stone.

No figure appears, No call of my name, No sound but “Tic-toc” Without check. Past the gate It clatters—is gone.

What rider it bears There is none to proclaim; And the Old Year has struck, And, scarce animate, The New makes moan.

Maybe that “More Tears!— More Famine and Flame— More Severance and Shock!” Is the order from Fate That the Rider speeds on To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.

I met a man when night was nigh, Who said, with shining face and eye Like Moses’ after Sinai:—

“I have seen the Moulder of Monarchies, Realms, peoples, plains and hills, Sitting upon the sunlit seas!— And, as He sat, soliloquies Fell from Him like an antiphonic breeze That pricks the waves to thrills.

“Meseemed that of the maimed and dead Mown down upon the globe,— Their plenteous blooms of promise shed Ere fruiting-time—His words were said, Sitting against the western web of red Wrapt in His crimson robe.

“And I could catch them now and then: —‘Why let these gambling clans Of human Cockers, pit liege men From mart and city, dale and glen, In death-mains, but to swell and swell again Their swollen All-Empery plans,

“‘When a mere nod (if my malign Compeer but passive keep) Would mend that old mistake of mine I made with Saul, and ever consign All Lords of War whose sanctuaries enshrine Liberticide, to sleep?

“‘With violence the lands are spread Even as in Israel’s day, And it repenteth me I bred Chartered armipotents lust-led To feuds . . . Yea, grieves my heart, as then I said, To see their evil way!’

—“The utterance grew, and flapped like flame, And further speech I feared; But no Celestial tongued acclaim, And no huzzas from earthlings came, And the heavens mutely masked as ’twere in shame Till daylight disappeared.”

Thus ended he as night rode high— The man of shining face and eye, Like Moses’ after Sinai.

I looked up from my writing, And gave a start to see, As if rapt in my inditing, The moon’s full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head Was spectral in its air, And I involuntarily said, “What are you doing there?”

“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole And waterway hereabout For the body of one with a sunken soul Who has put his life-light out.

“Did you hear his frenzied tattle? It was sorrow for his son Who is slain in brutish battle, Though he has injured none.

“And now I am curious to look Into the blinkered mind Of one who wants to write a book In a world of such a kind.”

Her temper overwrought me, And I edged to shun her view, For I felt assured she thought me One who should drown him too.