Kitabı oku: «Songs of the Army of the Night», sayfa 5

III
“AUSTRALIA: victoria – new south wales – queensland.”

THE OUTCASTS

(Melbourne.)

 
   Here to the parks they come,
   The scourings of the town,
Like weary wounded animals
   Seeking where to lie them down.
 
 
   Brothers, let us take together
   An easeful period.
There is worse than to be as we are —
   Cast out, not of men but of God!
 

VICTORIA TO JAMES MOORHOUSE, ¹⁷

Bishop of Melbourne, who left Melbourne for the Bishopric of Manchester, 10th March 1886.

 
He came, a stranger, and we gave him welcome
   More as loved friend than rumour’s honoured guest.
He spoke!  Were we, then, all so slack to listen?
   To hail him as our wisest, noblest, best?
          Why did he leave us?
 
 
He toiled!  And we, we under such a leader,
   Forgot all other creeds, but that he taught,
And proud of our clear answer to his summons,
   Forgot all other fights but that he fought!
          Why did he leave us?
 
 
He wearied!  ’Twas too great, he said, the burden.
   We saw it and we cried with anxious love;
“What does he (Let him back!) down in the battle?
   Is not the general’s place at rest above?”
          Why did he leave us?
 
 
He left us for a “wider sphere of labour!”
   A tinsel seat within a House that shakes,
To herd with priests meal-mouthed, with lords and liars
   That still would bind a nation’s chain that breaks!
          Why did he leave us?
 
 
Farewell, then!  Are there any to reproach you
   In all this facile crowd that weeps and cheers?
Not one!  But, ah you yet shall listen sadly
   To an echo falling faint through the dead years: —
          Why did he leave us?
 

IN THE SEA-GARDENS

(Sydney.)

“the man of the nation.”

 
Yonder the band is playing
   And the fine young people walk.
They are envying each other and talking
   Their pretty empty talk.
 
 
There, in the shade on the outskirts,
   Stretched on the grass, I see
A man with a slouch hat, smoking.
   That is the man for me!
 
 
That is the Man of the Nation;
   He works and much endures.
When all the rest is rotten,
   He rises and cuts and cures.
 
 
He’s the soldier of the Crimea,
   Fighting to honour fools;
He’s the grappler and strangler of Lee
   Lord of the terrible tools.
 
 
He’s in all the conquered nations
   That have won their own at last,
And in all that yet shall win it.
   And the world by him goes past!
 
 
O strong sly world, this nameless
   Still, much-enduring Man,
Is the hand of God that shall clutch you
   For all you have done, or can!
 

“UPSTARTS.”

 
What? do you say that we, the toilers – the slaves —
   (Why strain at the gnat name
Who swallow the camel thing your pocket craves?) —
   That we are “just the same,”
 
 
(Nay, worse) when power is ours and wealth – that we
   Are harder masters still,
More keen to ring her last from misery,
   More greedy of our will?
 
 
’Tis true!  And when you see men so – see us
   Sneer at us, call us swine! —
“How we must love you who have made us thus,
   You may perhaps divine!”
 

LABOUR – CAPITAL – LAND

 
In that rich archipelago of sea
With fiery hills, thick woods wherein the mias ¹⁸
Browses along the trees, and god-like men
Leave monuments of speech too large for us, ¹⁹
There are strange forest-trees.  Far up, their roots
Spread from the central trunk, and settle down
Deep in the life-fed earth, seventy feet below.
In the past days here grew another tree,
On whose high fork the parasitic seed
Fell and sprang up, and, finding life and strength
In the disease, decrepitude and death
Of that it fed on, utterly consumed it,
And stands the monument of Nature’s crime!
So Labour with his parasites, the two
Great swollen robbers, Land and Capital,
Stands to the gaze of men but as a heap
Of rotted dust whose only use must be
To rich the roots of the proud stem that killed it! ²⁰
 

AUSTRALIA

 
I see a land of desperate droughts and floods:
I see a land where need keeps spreading round,
And all but giants perish in the stress:
I see a land where more, and more, and more
The demons, Earth and Wealth, grow bloat and strong.
 
 
I see a land that lies a helpless prey
To wealthy cliques and gamblers and their slaves,
The huckster politicians: a poor land
That less and less can make her heart-wish law.
 
 
Yea, but I see a land where some few brave
Raise clear eyes to the Struggle that must come,
Reaching firm hands to draw the doubters in,
Preaching the gospel: “Drill and drill and drill!”
Yea, but I see a land where best of all
The hope of victory burns strong and bright!
 

ART

 
“Yes, let Art go, if it must be
   That with it men must starve —
If Music, Painting, Poetry
   Spring from the wasted hearth!”
 
 
Yes, let Art go, till once again
   Through fearless heads and hands
The toil of millions and the pain
   Be passed from out the lands:
 
 
Till from the few their plunder falls
   To those who’ve toiled and earned
But misery’s hopeless intervals
   From those who’ve robbed and spurned.
 
 
Yes, let Art go, without a fear,
   Like autumn flowers we burn,
For, with her reawakening year,
   Be sure she will return! —
 
 
Return, but greater, nobler yet
   Because her laurel crown
With dew and not with blood is wet,
   And as our queen sit down!
 

“HENRY GEORGE.”

(Melbourne.)

 
I came to buy a book.  It was a shop
Down in a narrow quiet street, and here
They kept, I knew, these socialistic books.
I entered.  All was bare, but clean and neat.
The shelves were ranged with unsold wares; the counter
Held a few sheets and papers.  Here and there
Hung prints and calendars.  I rapped, and straight
A young girl came out through the inner door.
She had a clear and simple face; I saw
She had no beauty, loveliness, nor charm,
But, as your eyes met those grey light-lit eyes
Like to a mountain spring so pure, you thought:
“He’d be a clever man who looked, and lied!”
I asked her for the book…  We spoke a little..
Her words were as her face was, as her eyes.
Yes, she’d read many books like this of mine:
Also some poets, Shelley, Byron too,
And Tennyson, but ‘poets only dreamed!’
Thus, then, we talked, until by chance I spoke
A phrase and then a name.  ’Twas “Henry George.”
Her face lit up.  O it was beautiful,
Or never woman’s face was!  “Henry George?”
She said.  And then a look, a flush, a smile,
Such as sprung up in Magdalenè’s cheek
When some voice uttered Jesus, made her angel.
She turned and pointed up the counter.  I,
Loosing mine eyes from that ensainted face,
Looked also.  ’Twas a print, a common print,
The head and shoulders of some man.  She said,
Quite in a whisper: “That’s him, Henry George!”
 
 
Darling, that in this life of wrong and woe,
The lovely woman-soul within you brooded
And wept and loved and hated and pitied,
And knew not what its helplessness could do,
Its helplessness, its sheer bewilderment —
That then those eyes should fall, those angel eyes,
On one who’d brooded, wept, loved, hated, pitied,
Even as you had, but therefrom had sprung
A hope, a plan, a scheme to right this wrong,
And make this woe less hateful to the sun —
And that pure soul had found its Master thus
To listen to, remember, watch and love,
And trust the dawn that rose up through the dark:
O this was good
For me to see, as for some weary hopeless
Longer and toiler for “the Kingdom of Heaven”
To stand some lifeless twilight hour, and hear,
There in the dim-lit house of Lazarus,
Mary who said: “Thus, thus, he looked, he spake,
The Master!” – So to hear her rapturous words,
And gaze upon her up-raised heavenly face!
 

WILLIAM WALLACE

(For the Ballarat statue of him.)

 
This is Scotch William Wallace.  It was he
Who in dark hours first raised his face to see:
   Who watched the English tyrant nobles spurn,
Steel-clad, with iron hoofs the Scottish free:
 
 
   Who armed and drilled the simple footman Kern,
   Yea, bade in blood and rout the proud Knight learn
His Feudalism was dead, and Scotland stand
   Dauntless to wait the day of Bannockburn!
 
 
O Wallace, peerless lover of thy land,
We need thee still, thy moulding brain and hand!
   For us, thy poor, again proud tyrants spurn,
The robber rich, a yet more hateful band!
 

THE AUSTRALIAN FLAG

 
Pure blue flag of heaven
   With your silver stars,
Not beside those crosses’
   Blood-stained torture-bars:
 
 
Not beside the token
   The foul sea-harlot gave,
Pure blue flag of heaven,
   Must you ever wave!
 
 
No, but young exultant,
   Free from care and crime,
The soulless selfish England
   Of this later time:
 
 
No, but, faithful, noble,
   Rising from her grave,
Flag of light and liberty,
   For ever must you wave!
 

TO AN OLD FRIEND IN ENGLAND

“esau.”

 
Was it for nothing in the years gone by,
   O my love, O my friend,
You thrilled me with your noble words of faith? —
Hope beyond life, and love, love beyond death!
Yet now I shudder, and yet you did not die,
   O my friend, O my love!
 
 
Was it for nothing in the dear dead years,
   O my love, O my friend,
I kissed you when you wrung my heart from me,
And gave my stubborn hand where trust might be?
Yet then I smiled, and see, these bitter tears,
   O my friend, O my love!
 
 
No bitter words to say to you have I,
   O my love, O my friend!
That faith, that hope, that love was mine, not yours!
And yet that kiss, that clasp endures, endures.
I have no bitter words to say.  Good-bye,
   O my friend, O my love!
 

AT THE SEAMEN’S UNION. ²¹

“the seamen and the miners.”

 
.. One rises now and speaks: “The Cause is one —
   Labour o’er all the earth!  Shan’t we, then, share
With these, whose very flesh and blood’s our own,
   All that we can of what we have and are?
 
 
“What is it that their work is in the earth,
   Down in its depths, and ours is on the sea?
The fight they fight is ours; their worth our worth;
   Their loss our loss.  We help them!  They are we!
 
 
“We help them! – Ay, and when our hour too breaks,
   And on to every ship that ploughs the wave
We put our hand at last, our hand that takes
   Its own, will they forget the help we gave?
 
 
“And, if our robber lords would rob us still
   With the foul hoard of beasts without a soul,
They may find leprous hands to work their will,
   But, for their ships, where will they find the coal?”
 
 
“Help them!” the voices cry.  They help them.  Here,
   Resolute, stern, menacing, hark the sound!
Look, ’tis the simple fearlessness of fear —
   Dark faces and deep voices all around.
 

TO HIS LOVE

 
“Teach me, love, to be true;
   Teach me, love, to love;
Teach me to be pure like you.
   It will be more than enough!
 
 
“Ah, and in days to come,
   Give me, my seraph, too,
A son nobler than I,
   A daughter true like you:
 
 
“A son to battle the wrong,
   To seek and strive for the right;
A beautiful daughter of song,
   To point us on to the light!”
 

HER POEM:

“my baby girl, that was born and died on the same day.”

 
“Ah, with torn heart I see them still,
   Wee unused clothes and empty cot.
Though glad my love has missed the ill
   That falls to woman’s lot.
 
 
“No tangled paths for her to tread
   Throughout the coming changeful years;
No desperate weird to dree and dread;
   No bitter lonely tears!
 
 
“No woman’s piercing crown of thorns
   Will press my aching baby’s brow;
No starless nights, no sunless morns,
   Will ever greet her now.
 
 
“The clothes that I had wrought with care
   Through weary hours for love’s sweet sake
Are laid aside, and with them there
   A heart that seemed to break.”
 

TO HENRY GEORGE IN AMERICA

 
Not for the thought that burns on keen and clear,
   Heat that the heat has turned from red to white,
   The passion of the lone remembering night
One with the patience day must see and hear —
Not for the shafts the lying foemen fear,
   Shot from the soul’s intense self-centring light —
   But for the heart of love divine and bright,
We praise you, worker, thinker, poet, seer!
Man of the People, – faithful in all parts,
   The veins’ last drop, the brain’s last flickering dole,
   You on whose forehead beams the aureole
That hope and “certain hope” alone imparts —
   Us have you given your perfect heart and soul;
Wherefore receive as yours our souls and hearts!
 

“ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.”

 
Shrieks out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire
   That is not quenched but hath for only fruit
   What writhes and dies not in its rotten root:
Two things made flesh, the visible desire
To match in filth the skunk, the ape in ire, ²²
   Mouthing before the mirrors with wild foot
   Beyond all feebler footprint of pursuit,
The perfect twanger of the Chinese lyre!
A heart with generous virtues run to seed
In vices making all a jumbled creed:
   A soul that knows not love nor trust nor shame,
But cuts itself with knives to bawl and bleed —
   If thou we’ve known of late, art still the same,
   What need, O soul, to sign thee with thy name?
 
 
Once on thy lips the golden-honeyed bees
   Settling made sweet the heart that was not strong,
   And sky and earth and sea burst into song: ²³
Once on thine eyes the light of agonies
Flashed through the soul and robbed the days of ease. ²⁴
   But tunes turn stale when love turns babe, and long
   The exiled gentlemen grow fat with wrong.
And peasants, workmen, beggars, what are these?  ²⁵
O you who sang the Italian smoke above, —
   Mud-lark of Freedom, pipe of that vile band
Whose envy slays the tyrant, not the love
Of these poor souls none have the keeping of —
   It is your hand – it is your pandar hand
   Smites the bruised mouth of pilloried Ireland!
 

TO AN UNIONIST

 
“If you only knew
How gladly I’ve given it
All these years —
The light of mine eyes,
The heat of my lips,
Mine agonies,
My yearning tears,
My blood that drips,
My brain that sears:
If you only knew
How gladly I’ve given it
All these years —
My hope and my youth,
My manhood, my Art,
My passion, my truth,
My mind and my heart:
 
 
“O my brother, you would not say,
   What have you to do with me?
You would not, would not turn away
   Doubtingly and bitterly.
 
 
“If you only knew
How little I cared for
These other things —
The delicate speech,
The high demand
Of each from each,
The imaginings
Of Love’s Holy Land:
If you only knew
How little I cared for
These other things —
The wide clear view
Over peoples and times,
The search in the new
Entrancing climes,
Science’s wings
And Art’s sweet chimes:
 
 
“O my brother, if you only knew
What to me in these things is understood,
As it seems to me it would seem to you,
What was good for the Cause was surely good:
 
 
“O my brother, you would not say:
   What have you to do with me?
You would not, would not turn away
   Doubtingly and bitterly:
 
 
“But you would take my hand with your hand,
   O my brother, if you only knew;
You would smile at me, you would understand,
   You would call me brother as I call you!”
 

TO MY FRIEND SYDNEY JEPHCOTT,

with a copy of my “poetical works.”

 
“Take with all my heart, friend, this,
   The labour of my past,
Though the heart here hidden is
And the soul’s eternities
   Hold the present fast.
 
 
“Take it, still, with soul and heart,
   Pledge of that dear day
When the shadows stir and start,
By the bright Sun burst apart —
   Young Australia!”
 

TO E. L. ZOX. ²⁶

(Melbourne.)

 
We thank you for a noble work well done.
There is a kindness – (’tis the truer one;
   The better part the simpler heart doth know),
The care to give the day a brighter sun
 
 
To these, the nameless crowd that drags on slow
The common toil, the common weary woe
   The world cares nought for.  But your work secures
Thro’ union strength and self-respect that grow.
 
 
There is a courage that unflawed endures
The sneer, the slander of earth’s epicures.
   And here are grateful women’s hearts to show
This kindness and this courage, both are yours!
 

“FATHER ABE.”

(Song of the American Sons of Labour.)

THE SONG

 
“O we knew so well, dear Father,
   When we answered to your call,
And the Southern Moloch stricken
   Shook and tottered to his fall —
 
 
“O we knew so well you loved us,
   And our hearts beat back to yours
With the rapturous adoration
   That through all the years endures!
 
 
“Mothers, sisters bade us hasten
   Sweethearts, wives with babe at breast;
For the Union, faith and freedom,
   For our hero of the West!
 
 
“And we wrung forth victory blood-stained
   From the desperate hands of Crime,
And our Cause blazed out Man’s beacon
   Through the endless future time!
 
 
“And forgiven, forever we bade it
   Cease, that envy, hatred, strife,
As he willed, our murdered Father
   That had sealed his love with life!
 
 
“O dear Father, was it thus, then?
   Did we this but in a dream?
Is it real, hideous present?
   Does our suffering only seem?
 
 
“Bend and listen, look and tell us!
   Are these joyless toilers We?
Slaves more wretched, patient, piteous
   Than the slaves we fought to free!
 
 
“Are these weak, worn girls and women
   Those whose mothers yet can tell
How they kissed and clasped men god-like
   With fierce faces fronting hell?
 
 
“Bend and listen, look and tell us!
   Is this silent waste, possessed
By bloat thieves and their task-masters,
   Thy free, thy fair, thy fearless West?
 
 
“Are these Eastern mobs of wage-slaves,
   Are these cringing debauchees,
Sons of those who slung their rifles —
   Shook the old Flag to the breeze?”
 

THE ANSWER

 
“Men and boys, O fathers, brothers,
   Burst these fetters round you bound!
Women, sisters, wives and mothers,
   Lift your faces from the ground!
 
 
“O Democracy, O People,
   East and West and North and South,
Rise together, one for ever,
   Strike this Crime upon the mouth!
 
 
“Bid them not, the men who loved you,
   Those who fought for you and died,
Scorn you that you broke a small Crime,
   Left a great Crime pass in pride!
 
 
“England, France, the played-out countries,
   Let them reek there in their stew,
Let their past rot out their present,
   But the Future is with you!
 
 
“O America, O first-born
   Of the age that yet shall be
Where all men shall be as one man,
   Noble, faithful, fearless, free! —
 
 
“O America, O paramour
   Of the foul slave-owner Pelf,
You who saved from slavery others,
   Now from slavery save yourself!
 
 
“Save yourself, though, anguish-shaken,
   You cry out and bow your head,
Crying ‘Why am I forsaken?’
   Crying ‘It is finishèd!’
 
 
“Save yourself, no God will save you;
   Not one angel can He give!
They and He are dead and vanished,
   And ’tis you, ’tis you must live!
 
 
“Risen again, fire-tried, victorious,
   From the grave of Crime down-hurled,
Peerless, pure, serene and glorious,
   Wield the sceptre of the world!”
 

A FOOL

(Brisbane)

 
He asked me of my friend – “a clever man;
Such various talent, business, journalism;
A pen that might some day have sent out ‘leaders’
From our greatest newspapers.” – “Yes, all this,
All this,” I said. – “And yet he will not rise?
He’ll stay a “comp.,” a printer all his life?” —
I said: “Just that, a workman all his life.”
But, as my questioner was a business man,
One of the sons of Capital, a sage
Whose practicality saw I can suppose
Quite to his nose-tip even his finger-ends,
I vouchsafed explanation.  “This young man
My friend, was born and bred a workman.  All
His heart and soul (And men have hearts and souls
Other than those the doctor proses of,
The parson prates of, and both make their trade)
Were centred in his comradeship and love.
His friends, his ‘chums’, were workmen, and the girl
He wooed, and made a happy wife and mother,
Had heart and soul like him in whence she sprung.
Observe now!  When he came to think and read,
He saw (it seemed to him he saw) in what
Capitalists, Employers, men like you,
Think and call ‘justice’ in your inter-dealings,
Some slight mistakes (I fancy he’d say ‘wrongs’)
Whereby his order suffered.  So he wonders:
‘Cannot we change this?’  And he tries and tries,
Knowing his fellows and adapting all
His effort in the channels that they know.
You understand?  He’s ‘only an Unionist!’
Now for the second point.  This man believes
That these mistakes – these wrongs (we’ll pass the word)
Spring from a certain thing called ‘competition’
Which you (and I) know is a God-given thing
Whereby the fittest get up to the top
(That’s I – or you) and tread down all the others.
Well, this man sees how by this God-given thing
He has the chance to use his extra wits
And clamber up: he sees how others have —
(Like you – or me; my father’s father’s father
Was a market-gardener and, I trust, a good one).
He sees, moreover, how perpetually
Each of his fellows who has extra wits
Has used them as the fox fallen in the well
Used the confiding goat, and how the goats
More and more wallow there and stupefy,
Robbed of the little wit the hapless crowd
Had in their general haplessness.  Well, then
This man of mine (This is against all law,
Human, divine and natural, I admit)
Prefers to wallow there and not get out,
Except they all can!  I’ve made quite a tale
About what is quite simple.  Yet ’tis curious,