Jock lifts his head; Macdonough sights his gun
To fire—but in his face a ball of flesh,
A whizzing clod, has hurled him in a mesh
Of tangled rope and tun,
While still about the deck the lubber clod is spun
And, bouncing from the rail, lies in a plesh
Of oozing blood, upstaring eyeless, red—
A gunner’s head.
* * * * * * * *
Above the ships, enormous from the lake,
Rises a wraith—a phantom dim and gory,
Lifting her wondrous limbs of smoke and glory;
And little children quake
And lordly nations bow their foreheads for her sake,
And bards proclaim her in their fiery story;
And in her phantom breast, heartless unheeding,
Hearts—hearts are bleeding.
IV
Macdonough lies with Downie in one land.
Victor and vanquished long ago were peers.
Held in the grip of peace an hundred years,
England has laid her hand
In ours, and we have held—and still shall hold—the band
That makes us brothers of the hemispheres;
Yea, still shall keep the lasting brotherhood
Of law and blood.
Yet one whose terror racked us long of yore
Still wreaks upon the world her lawless might:
Out of the deeps again the phantom Fight
Looms on her wings of war,
Sowing in armèd camps and fields her venomed spore,
Embattling monarch’s whim against man’s right,
Trampling with iron hoofs the blooms of time
Back in the slime.
We, who from dreams of justice, dearly wrought,
First rose in the eyes of patient Washington,
And through the molten heart of Lincoln won
To liberty forgot,
Now, standing lone in peace, ’mid titans strange distraught,
Pray much for patience, more—God’s will be done!—
For vision and for power nobly to see
The world made free.
The Outlook Percy MacKaye
THE PROPHET
Jeremiah, will you come?
Will you gather up the multitudes, and wake them with a drum?
Will you dare anoint the chosen ones from all the cattle kind,
And threaten with the fire of God the foolish and the blind?
Jeremiah, Jeremiah, we have waited for you long,
To see the flaming fury of your hate against the wrong,
For we dally in the Temple, and we flee the eye of Truth,
And we waste along the wilderness the glory of our youth.
Jeremiah, Jeremiah, here the lying prophets speak,
Here they flatter in their feebleness the gilded and the sleek;
But their languid pipings die in shame when trumpet cries are heard.
Are you coming? Are you coming? O Prophet of the Word!