Patience—but peace of heart we cannot choose;
Nor would he wish us cravenly to keep
Aloof in soul, who—large in statesmanship
And justice—sent our ships to Vera Cruz.
Patience must wring our hearts, while we refuse
To launch our country on that crimson deep
Which breaks the dikes of Europe, but we sleep
Watchful, still waiting by the awful fuse.
Wisdom he counsels, and he counsels well
Whose patient fortitude against the fret
And sneer of time has stood inviolable
We love his goodness and will not forget.
With him we pause beside the mouth of hell:—
The wolf of Europe has not triumphed yet.
V
KRUPPISM
Crowned on the twilight battlefield, there bends
A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold,
Chuckling: “One hundred thousand gatlings—sold!”
And the moon rises, and a moaning rends
The mangled living, and the dead distends,
And a child cowers on the chartless wold,
Where, searching in his safety vault of mold,
The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends.
We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls,
And dying do him homage: yea, and give
Daily our living souls to be enticed
Into his power. So long as on war’s walls
We build engines of death that he may live,
So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.
VI
THE REAL GERMANY
Bismarck—or rapt Beethoven with his dreams:
Ah, which was blind? Or which bespoke his race?—
That breed which nurtured Heine’s haunting grace,
And Goethe, mastering Olympic themes
Of meditation, Mozart’s golden gleams,
And Leibnitz charting realms of time and space,
Great-hearted Schiller, and that fairy brace
Of brothers who first trailed the goblin streams.
Bismarck for these builded an iron tomb,
And clanged the door, and turned a kaiser’s key;
And simple folk that once danced merrily
Their May-ring rites, march now in roaring gloom
Toward that renascent dawn when the black womb
Of buried guns gives birth to Germany.
Boston Transcript Percy MacKaye