TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
April, 1917.
Brothers in blood! They who this wrong began
To wreck our commonwealth, will rue the day
When first they challenged freemen to the fray,
And with the Briton dared the American.
Now are we pledged to win the Rights of man;
Labour and justice now shall have their way,
And in a League of Peace—God grant we may—
Transform the earth, not patch up the old plan.
Sure is our hope since he, who led your nation,
Spake for mankind; and ye arose in awe
Of that high call to work the world’s salvation;
Clearing your minds of all estranging blindness
In the vision of Beauty, and the Spirit’s law,
Freedom and Honour and sweet Loving-kindness.
TRAFALGAR SQUARE
September, 1917.
Fool that I was: my heart was sore,
Yea sick for the myriad wounded men,
The maim’d in the war: I had grief for each one:
And I came in the gay September sun
To the open smile of Trafalgar Square;
Where many a lad with a limb fordone
Loll’d by the lion-guarded column
That holdeth Nelson statued thereon
Upright in the air.
The Parliament towers and the Abbey towers,
The white Horseguards and grey Whitehall,
He looketh on all,
Past Somerset House and the river’s bend
To the pillar’d dome of St. Paul,
That slumbers confessing God’s solemn blessing
On England’s glory, to keep it ours—
While children true her prowess renew
And throng from the ends of the earth to defend
Freedom and honour—till Earth shall end.
The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow,
In his country tomb of peaceful fame,
Must feel exiled from life and glow
If he think of this man with his warrior claim,
Who looketh o’er London as if ’twere his own,
As he standeth in stone, aloft and alone,
Sailing the sky with one arm and one eye.