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 [79a]
Browses along the trees, and god-like men
Leave monuments of speech too large for us, [79b]
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! [80]