“ONE AMONG SO MANY.”
. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me,
Importuning, one wet and mild March night.
We walked and talked together. O her tale
Was very common; thousands know it all!
Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming;
Parents that railed; London; the child born dead;
A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls
“Taken on” a few months at a dressmaker’s
In the crush of the “season;” thirteen shillings a week!
The fashionable people’s dresses done,
And they flown off, these fifty extra girls
Sent—to the streets: that is, to work that gives
Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes
Respectable employers all demand
Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!
And she—“Why, I have gone on down and down,
And there’s the gutter, look, that I shall die in!”
“My dear,” I say, “where hope of all but that
Is gone, ’tis time, I think, life were gone too.”
She looks at me. “That I should kill myself?”—
“That you should kill yourself.”—“That would be sin,
And God would punish me!”—“And will not God
Punish for this?” She pauses: then whispers:
“No, no, He will forgive me, for He knows!”
I laughed aloud: “And you,” she said, “and you,
Who are so good, so noble” . . . “Noble? Good?”
I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat.
O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep
Of this vast flock that perishes alone
Out in the pitiless desert!—Yet she’d speak:
She’d ask me: she’d entreat: she’d demonstrate.
O I must not say that! I must believe!
Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the sky
So big and blue and pure above it all?
O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep,
Entreat no more and demonstrate no more;
For I believe there is a God, a God
Not in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no,
But in the heart of man, on the dear lips
Of angel women, of heroic men!
O hopeless wanderer that would not stay,
(“It is too late, I cannot rise again!”)
O saint of faith in love behind the veils,
(“You must believe in God, for you are good!”),
O sister who made holy with your kiss,
Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of March
There in the hideous infamous London streets
My cheek, and made my soul a sacred place,
O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep!
THE NEW LOCKSLEY HALL.
“forty years after.”
Comrade, yet a little further I would go before the night
Closes round and chills in darkness all the glorious sunset light—
Yet a little, by the cliff there, till the stately home I see
Of the man who once was with us, comrade once with you and me!
Nay, but leave me, pass alone there; stay awhile and gaze again
On the various-jewelled waters and the dreamy southern main,
For the evening breeze is sighing in the quiet of the hills
Moving down in cliff and terrace to the singing sweet sea-rills,
While the river, silent-stealing, thro’ the copse and thro’ the lea
Winds her waveless way eternal to the welcome of the sea.
Yes, within that green-clad homestead, gardened grounds and velvet ease
Of a home where culture reigneth and the chambers whisper peace,
Is the man, the seer and singer, who (ah, years and years away!)
Lifted up a face of gladness at the breaking of the day.
For the noontide’s desperate ardours that had seen the Roman town
Wrap the boy Keats, “by the hungry generations trodden down,”
In his death-shroud with the ashes of the fairy child of storm,
Fluttering skylark in the breakers, caught and smothered by the foam,
And had closed those eyes heroic, weary for the final peace.
Byron maimed and maddened, strangled in the anguish that was Greece—
For this noontide passed to darkness, brooding doubt and wild dismay,
Where the silly sparrows chirruped and the eagles swooped away,
Till once more the trampled Peoples and the murdered soul of man
Raised a haggard face half-wondering where the new-born day began,
Where the sign of Faith’s renewal, Faith’s, and Hope’s, and Love’s, outgrew
In the golden sun arising; and we hailed it, we and you!
O you hailed it, and your heart beat, and your pretty woman’s lays,
In the fathomless vibration of our rapturous amaze,
Died for ever on your harpstrings, and you rose and struck a chord
High, full, clear, heroic, godlike, “for the glory of the Lord!”
Noble words you spoke; we listened; and we dreamed the day had come
When the faith of God and Christ should sound one cry with Man’s freedom—
When the men who stood beside us, eager with hell’s troops to cope,
Radiant, thrilled exultant, proud, with the magnificence of hope!
“Forward! forward!” ran our watch-word. “Forward! forward!” by our side
You gave back the glorious summons. Would that day that you had died!
Better lying fallen, death-struck, breathless, bleeding, on your face,
With your bright sword pointing onward, dying happy in your place!
Better to have passed in spirit from the battle-storm’s eclipse
With the great Cause in your heart and with the war-shout on your lips!
Better to have fallen charging, having known the nobler time,
In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line—
Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead,
Up the slopes and thro’ the smoke-clouds, thro’ the dying and the dead,
Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout,
On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!
O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain
That remembered Egypt’s flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed again—
Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills,
And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills.
There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves,
(Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of slaves,
Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stew
Where freedom “broadens down” so slow it stops with lords and you!
O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes,
Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times,
Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet knights
Tilted gaily or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights?
O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best,
Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not rest—
Men of science, “vivisectors!”—democrats, the “rout of beasts”—
Writers, essayists and poets, “Belial’s prophets, Moloch’s priests!”
Coward, you have made the great refusal? you have won the gilded praise
Of the wringers of his heart’s-blood from the peasant’s sunless days,
Of the lord and the land-owner, of the rich man who has bound
Labour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the ground,
With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had,
Crying, “Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them mad!”
Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to take
What of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood’s sake,
Blustering long and loudest at the hideousness and pain
These you praise have brought upon us; blustering long and loud again
At our agony and anguish in this desperate fight of ours,
Grappling with anarch custom and the darkness and the powers!
O begone, then, from among us! Echo not, however faint,
Our great watch-word, our great war-shout, sweet and sickly poet-saint!
Sit there dreaming in your gardens, looking out upon the sea,
Till the night-time closes round you and the wind is on the lea.
Enter then within your chambers in the rich and quiet light;
Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night.
Soothe your fancy with your visions; bend a gracious senile ear
To the praise your guests are murmuring in the tone you love to hear.
Honoured of your Queen, and honoured of the gentlest and the best,
Lord and commoner and rich-man, smirking tenant, shopman, priest,
All distinguished and respectable, the shiny sons of light,
O what, O what are these who call you coward in the night?
Ay, what are we who struggled for the cause of Science, say,
Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Häckel, marshalling our stern array?
We who raised the cry for Culture, Goethe’s spirit leading on,
Marching gladly with our captains, Renan, Arnold, Emerson?
We, we are not tinkers, tinkers of the kettle cracked and broke,
Tailors squatted cross-legged, patching at the greasy worn-out cloak!
We are those that faced mad Fortune, cried: “The Truth, and only she!
Onward, upward! If we perish, we at least will perish free!”
We have lost our souls to win them, in the house and in the street
Falling stabbed and poisoned, making a victory of defeat.
We have lost the happy present, we have paid death’s heavy debt,
We have won, have won the Future, and its sons shall not forget!
Enter, then, within your chamber in the rich and quiet light;