He planned in continents and Empire hewed,
Moulding from out the waste an ordered world,
Striding a bronzed Colossus, grim and rude,
O'er Afric veldt and Egypt's sands, storm-swirled,
Pressing Imperial-purposed, to his goal;
Before, his country's high and luminous star,
He on her altar laid his splendid soul.
Bequeathed in martyrdom of glorious war.
Beside the Cyprus hills or Nubian sands,
By Libya's stony, terraced, huge plateau,
Within the trackless silence, "what commands!"
Whispered the Sphinx, his ear alone to know.
What portents shaped the wild sirocco's rage
Where Memnon tunes across the plain at dawn?
Saw he the vast armies of the west engage
In strife stupendous, in those days agone,
When by the Nile he conquered at Khartoum?
Saw he unmoved the vision of his doom?
With his high fame and liberty secure,
He rests, his task gigantic, nobly done.
Born for the ages, ever to endure,
He would not pass were victory not won.
Behold the prodigy he reared!—arrayed,
The millions surging to his trumpet voice
Proclaim the triumph that his genius laid.
Be brave, my England; it is well, rejoice!
Like Egypt's temples towering he stands
Amid the crumbling nations, battle-strewn,
Shadowing times, shifting war-duned sands,
Prodigious, silent, sombre, and immune.
THE CRIMSON YEAR
CHRISTMAS, 1916
From Riga southward to the Horn, fierce beats the iron hail,
Beneath the Pole Star and the Cross, war's Vampire rides the gale.
Across earth's shaken palisades, the red sirocco blows
From sand of Suez in the south to Yukon's northern snows.
And who are these who sally forth—these million doomed to die,
Where scarred between embattled hordes, the scalped hills bloody lie,
Sons of the mothers of the world, each sworn to overwhelm
Legions of men of many climes, from city, farm, and realm.
Sons of the mothers of the Earth, who out of love were born,
Go forth in majesty of health and come back maimed and torn.
Caught in the whirlpool of the war, all raging, battle-swirled,
Boiling and reeling, bloody-foamed, labours the frenzied world.
Who dare cry peace where all is strife; Who bid the conflict cease?
Who dares to kneel beside the crib which thrones the Prince of Peace?
Behold! it is the Christmas time, the feast of Him divine;
How shall we stand with stained hands, and worship at His shrine?