Philosophies

World-Sorrows

Reading edition

World-Sorrows

Lo! here accursèd caste

Hath made men things that creep;

The beggars totter past,

The baser sultans sleep;

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.

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,

Where thou beholdest Death

Confound and desolate,

And men like ants beneath

The giant feet of Fate.

III

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.’

Philosophies

If it be not to be,

Or being be in vain,

That high philosophy

Shall ever counsel men

To mend this mindless state

In which, as in the East,

We drift on floods of fate,

As helpless as the beast,

Then here the issue is—

Look on this land and weep—

A race as ruin’d as this,

A misery as deep.

Seeing how pent we are

Within our human ways,

That save in ceaseless war

We cannot spend our days,

In struggle each with each

To get a breathing space,

While Heaven, out of reach,

Looks on with scornful face;

I wonder, for man’s sake,

Cannot that mind of his

Which made the engine make

A better state than this?

Here sitting in my place

There comes to me unsought

The beautiful sad face

Of this undying thought.

And with it as in scorn

The present state descried

Of monsters heaven-born

And angels crucify’d,

Where, scourged to unnatural toil,

In palsy’d posture bent,

Man creeping near the soil

Forgets the firmament.

III

Since, since we first began

To measure near and far,

And know that the thoughts of man

His chiefest actions are,

A thousand cries in sooth

Call us thro’ time amain,

And every cry a truth

And every truth a gain,

And yet the needful task,

To mend this state withal,

Remains undone; we ask,

What is the good of all?

Do, cries the lofty seer;

Believe, the prelate cries;

Be, beauty’s priest austere

Persuades. The man replies,

‘We have three beds at home

Where eight of us must lie;

Three blankets and one room,

My children, wife and I.

All day our work we mind;

But little money gain;

At night the wintry wind

Whines thro’ the window-pane.’

So one doth read at ease

With comfortable wine

Devout philosophies

That say, for him, divine,

To be, to bear, to act,

To know oneself, be strong,

Are all the heav’ns exact.

He answers, ‘I am strong;

I fear not any fate;

I do; I nobly bear.’

A beggar at his gate

Cries in the bitter air.