What fatal Beauty bears in hand
With strumpet’s lure this sore divide?
For lo, her brow, to venal brand,
Reads fierce with lust of worldly pride!
Why wears true Grace so blanched a cheek?
What things o’ Night do rouse for prey,
Confound with grim and loathsome reek
The balmy breath of youngling Day?
What lists be those? What dirges wail?
Why drags white Peace yon gory pall?
I see great Mars in flame-knit mail,
I hear the fierce god’s buglers call.
And gleamy steel from scabbard flies,
War’s every hound is red at mouth,
No belching throat but havoc cries,
Would drench in blood the Summer’s drought.
Out, Sense! some trick is here of phrenzied Night;
These clamors wind no human breath,
But ghostly haunt yon winsome light
The phantom shades of legioned Death.
And yet yon orb is surely Day’s:
The Land re-speaks him, and his glass, the sea;
All tongues at one, no witness stays,
But owns his line observantly.
Nay, flung wide is now the portaled East;
Behind, before, Light’s lofty welcome burns,
Whose cheer wide-spread for Most and Least,
Repledged, alone, his host-call earns.
But O, what mates come here to feed!
They spill the sweet and lifesome wine;
They fool the sense with sightless greed,
The knife their law twixt yours and mine.
And these, for sure, are Afric’s strands,
And those have rid the hurly sea,
Whence towering fair great Albion stands,
His brow writ broad with Liberty;
With her, whose cheer is general joy—
The gracious board whose never mess
Lets these to pine, so those may cloy
And glut his maw, the Hog, Excess—