A true expression of himself I said Mr. Hawkins’s poems are. In no degree are they fictions. As a companion to Credo, quoted to introduce him, I will give the last poem in his book, which will again set him before us as he is:
HERO OF THE ROAD
Let me seek no statesman’s mantle,
Let me seek no victor’s wreath,
Let my sword unstained in battle
Still lie rusting in its sheath;
Let my garments be unsullied,
Let no man’s blood to me cling;
Life is love and earth is heaven,
If I may but soar and sing.
This then is my sternest struggle,
Ease the load and sing my song,
Lift the lame and cheer the cheerless
As they plod the road along;
And we see ourselves transfigured
In a new and bigger plan;
Man transformed, his own Messiah,
God embodied into man.
For the whining craven class of men Mr. Hawkins has little respect:
The man who complains
When the world is all song,
Or dares to sit mute
When the world is all wrong;
Who barters his freedom
Vile honors to win,
Deserves but to die
With the vilest of men.
Upon the times in which we live his judgment is severe. His condemnation, however, bears witness to that earnestness of soul and that idealism of spirit which will not let the world repose in its wickedness. From a list of several poems attesting this I select the following as perhaps the most complete in form:
THE DEATH OF JUSTICE
These the dread days which the seers have foretold,
These the fell years which the prophets have dreamed;
Visions they saw in those full days of old,
The fathers have sinned and the children blasphemed.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.
We have come to the travail of troublous times,
Justice must bow before Moloch and Baal;
Blasphemous prayers for the triumph of crimes,
High sounds the cry of the children who wail.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.