Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
1915.
CRY OF THE HOMELESS
AFTER THE PRUSSIAN INVASION OF BELGIUM
“Instigator of the ruin—
Whichsoever thou mayst be
Of the masterful of Europe
That contrived our misery—
Hear the wormwood-worded greeting
From each city, shore, and lea
Of thy victims:
“Conqueror, all hail to thee!”
“Yea: ‘All hail!’ we grimly shout thee
That wast author, fount, and head
Of these wounds, whoever proven
When our times are throughly read.
‘May thy loved be slighted, blighted,
And forsaken,’ be it said
By thy victims,
‘And thy children beg their bread!’
“Nay: a richer malediction!—
Rather let this thing befall
In time’s hurling and unfurling
On the night when comes thy call;
That compassion dew thy pillow
And bedrench thy senses all
For thy victims,
Till death dark thee with his pall.”
August 1915.
BEFORE MARCHING AND AFTER
(in Memoriam F. W. G.)
Orion swung southward aslant
Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned,
The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant
With the heather that twitched in the wind;
But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these,
Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow,
And wondered to what he would march on the morrow.
The crazed household-clock with its whirr
Rang midnight within as he stood,
He heard the low sighing of her
Who had striven from his birth for his good;
But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze,
What great thing or small thing his history would borrow
From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow.