by Werther.
Originally published in The Poet's Magazine (Leonard Lloyd) vol.4 #17 (Jan 1878).
Ye who are blind with passion, ye who are drunk as with wine,
Whose faces the lightnings flash on in vain, and the sunbeams shine,
Ye who are dead or sleeping the sleep of an endless night,
Ye who are stubbornly keeping your faces turned from the light,
Ye who press on for the guerdon of perishing dross and clay,
Ye who are bearing the burden, and toil, and heat of the day,
Who fix on the earth your faces and delve in the dust for dust,
Ye too who sit in high places and live for leasing and lust,
Ye who with fire and sabre are breaking the peace of God,
Who war each man with his neighbour, and crimson with gore the sod,
I have a word to deliver; the wrath of the Lord is stirred;
Will ye laugh me to scorn, or quiver with terror? I will be heard.
When freedom shall come from the mountains, or rise from the depths of the sea,
Will she mourn by the broken fountains for bloodshed that yet shall be?
Will she come as a maid in white raiment, with womanly eyes downcast,
With gifts in her hands without payment, and pardon for all things past?
Will she come, as she came to our fathers, in the twilight ages of old,
Like a delicate maid, who gathers the lambs to the shade of the fold?
Will she come as though decked for her bridal, blushing and sweet and fair,
With eyes like a poet's idol, and the sunset caught in her hair?
Such did our fathers see her, and loved her through joy and pain;
But such, O fools, shall not be her guise when she comes again.
For I hear a cry as of trouble, and the clashing of arms afar,
And a noise as of fire in the stubble, and trumpets sounded for war.
My eyes at the noise are quickened, and into the hideous night
I gaze, and my soul is sickened almost to death at the sight;
Dimly I see her looming, storm-clouds are round her path,
And I see in the dreary glooming a face full of grief and wrath;
Like a mermaid's hair down-streaming over her shoulders bare,
And a blood red stain is gleaming like a baleful star in her hair;
Flushed is her face, and deadly the flash of those star-lit spheres,
Whose orbs are made clouded and red by passionate floods of tears;
But past are the tears, and no longer does pity fall from her lips;
She comes now fiercer and stronger than the tempest that shatters the ships;
And forth from her lips a pean for the triumph that shall be won,
Peals forth, and its sound shall be an omen of battle begun;
T'is not a weird sad moaning as of bees in the summer time,
But a hollow and fierce intoning of passionate Godless rhyme.
And perched on her wrist a raven sits croaking a hellish song;
He will feast on the flesh of the craven hosts of our lords ere long.
Her right hand a sword is slaking with blood of man and of beast;
Such a dawn is this that is breaking in crimson bars in the East.
Foul hell-hounds spring to attend her, and lick the blood at her feet;
Have ye strength, O our lords to rend her, when in deadly strife ye meet?
For the sound of her coming is heard on the hills, and the dead souls live;
For the gift of your lives what guerdon of gold or of blood will ye give,
Or clutching at sword and fetter will ye stand at bay in her path?
O our Masters, it had been better to face your God in his wrath.—
As for one who with bare heel crushes the head of a deadly snake;
As for one who should bind with rushes their fury when fierce flows break;
As for him who should wait for the falling of a sword o'er his bare neck bared;
Such hope will there be for you calling for mercy when none shall be spared,
In the tumult and rush of the slaughter, the anguish and glory of strife,
When blood shall flow freer than water, and none shall give gold for his life,
When the captive shall burst from his prison, the dead come forth from his grave,
In the flush of the dawn re-arisen whose light shall make coward hearts brave.
Ye have bent her, and crushed her, and bound her, ye have pressed your feet on her neck,
Cast darkness and weeping around her; your chains are the jewels that deck
Those limbs that were once like the gleaming of snow on the frost-bound earth.
Ere her eyes for your hardness were streaming, ere smothered in wrath was her mirth.
Call aloud upon God now to aid you, let Him save if He will at the last;
No prayer in the old time prayed you, but now, with vigil and fast,
With groans and penance and clamour of weeping entreat His grace,
With burning of incense, and glamour of bright lights, shadow His face;
Bend the stubborn knees till they harden and grow to the stone-paved floor:—
By the anguish of Christ in the garden, by the cross and the pangs He bore,
By the life that He lived for your ransom, by the price He paid for your bliss,
By the pity He promised to man, some mercy you cannot miss.
But we come in the might of His promise, and freedom is born of the Son;
Think ye now He will snatch her from us, ere the battle is scarce begun?
She laughs you to scorn, and hollow her laughter rings in the sky;
Her flight is sure as the swallow who tells that the summer is nigh;
And when in your streets like wine the blood of your sons is poured,
When no man your soul delivers from the flash of her blood red sword;
Turn again and remember her sorrow, think again on her floods of tears,
For the sun that shall rise on that morrow shall set not through infinite years.