Songs of the Army of the Night Part 7

"Till once more the people rise, Once more, once and only once, Blood-red hands and blazing eyes Of the robbed and murdered ones!

"So good night, dear desperate heart.

(Nay, 'tis sun-bright day we keep.) Soon we meet, though now we part.

Kiss me . . . Take it . . . Go and sleep!"

"THE TRUTH."

Come then, let us at least know what's the truth.

Let us not blink our eyes and say We did not understand; old age or youth Benumbed our sense or stole our sight away.

It is a lie-just that, a lie-to declare That wages are the worth of work.

No; they are what the Employer wills to spare To let the Employee sheer starvation shirk.

They're the life-pittance Compet.i.tion leaves, The least for which brother'll slay brother.

He who the fruits of this h.e.l.l-strife receives, He is a thief, an a.s.sa.s.sin, and none other!

It is a lie-just that, a lie-to declare That Rent's the interest on just gains.

Rent's the thumb-screw that makes the worker share With him who worked not the produce of his pains.

Rent's the wise tax the human tape-worm knows.

The fat he takes; the life-lean leaves.

The holy Landlord is, as we suppose, Just this-the model of a.s.sa.s.sin-thieves!

What is the trick the rich-man, then, contrives?

How play my lords their brilliant roles?- _They live on the plunder of our toiling lives_, _The degradation of our bodies and souls_!

TO THE SONS OF LABOUR.

Grave this deep in your hearts, Forget not the tale of the past!

Never, never believe That any will help you, or can, Saving only yourselves!

What have the gentlemen done, Peerless haters of wrong, Byrons and Sh.e.l.leys, what?

They stand great famous names, Demi-G.o.ds to their own, Shadows far off, alien To us and ours for ever.

Those who love them and hate The crime, the injustice they hated, What can they do but shout, Win a name from our woes, And leave us just as we were?

No, but resolutely turned, Our wants, our desires made clear, And clear the means that shall win them, Drill and drill and drill!

Then when the day is come, When the royal battle-flag's up, When blood has been spilled in vain In timid half-hearted war, Then let the Cromwell rise, The simple, the true-souled man; Then let Grant come forth, The calm, the determined comrade, But deep in their hearts one hate, Deep in their souls one thought, To bring the iniquity low, To make the People free!

Ah, for such as these We with the same heart-hate, We with the same soul-thought, Will fall to our destined places In the ranks of the great New Model, {49} In the Army that sees ahead Marston, Naseby, Whitehall, The Wilderness, Petersburg,-yes, But beyond the blood and the smoke, Beyond the struggle and death, The Union victorious safe, The Commonwealth glorious free!

TO THE ARTISTS.

You tell me these great lords have raised up Art: I say they have degraded it. Look you, When ever did they let the poet sing, The painter paint, the sculptor hew and cast, The music raise her heavenly voice, except To praise them and their wretched rule o'er men?

Behold our English poets that were poor Since these great lords were rich and held the state: Behold the glories of the German land, Poets, musicians, driven, like them, to death Unless they'd tune their spirits' harps to play Drawing-room pieces for the chattering fools Who aped the taste for Art or for a leer.

Go to, no Art was ever n.o.ble yet, n.o.ble and high, the speech of G.o.dlike men, When fetters bound it, be they gold or flowers.

All that is n.o.blest, highest, greatest, best, Comes from the Galilean peasant's hut, comes from The Stratford village, the Ayrshire plough, the shop That gave us Chaucer, the humble Milton's trade- Bach's, Mozart's, great Beethoven's,-And these are they Who knew the People, being what they knew!

Go to, if in the future years no strain, No picture of earth's glory like to what Your Artists raised for that small clique or this Of supercilious imbecilities- O if no better demi-G.o.ds of Art Can rise save those whose barbarous tinsel yet Makes hideous all the beauty of old homes- Then let us seek the comforts of despair In democratic efforts dead and gone: Weep with Pheideian Athens, sigh an hour With Raffaelle's Florence, beat the head and breast O'er Shakspere's England that from Milton's took In lips the name that leaped from lead and flame From out her heart against the Spanish guns!

"ONE AMONG SO MANY."

. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me, Importuning, one wet and mild March night.

We walked and talked together. O her tale Was very common; thousands know it all!

Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming; Parents that railed; London; the child born dead; A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls "Taken on" a few months at a dressmaker's In the crush of the "season;" thirteen shillings a week!

The fashionable people's dresses done, And they flown off, these fifty extra girls Sent-to the streets: that is, to work that gives Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes Respectable employers all demand Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!

And she-"_Why_, _I have gone on down and down_, _And there's the gutter_, _look_, _that I shall die in_!"

"My dear," I say, "where hope of all but that Is gone, 'tis time, I think, life were gone too."

She looks at me. "_That I should kill myself_?"- "That you should kill yourself."-"_That would be sin_, _And G.o.d would punish me_!"-"And will not G.o.d Punish for this?" She pauses: then whispers: "_No_, _no_, _He will forgive me_, _for He knows_!"

I laughed aloud: "_And you_," she said, "_and you_, _Who are so good_, _so n.o.ble_" . . . "n.o.ble? Good?"

I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat.

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep Of this vast flock that perishes alone Out in the pitiless desert!-Yet she'd speak: She'd ask me: she'd entreat: she'd demonstrate.

O I must not say that! I must believe!

Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the sky So big and blue and pure above it all?

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep, Entreat no more and demonstrate no more; For I believe there _is_ a G.o.d, a G.o.d Not in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no, But in the heart of man, on the dear lips Of angel women, of heroic men!

O hopeless wanderer that would not stay, ("_It is too late_, _I cannot rise again_!") O saint of faith in love behind the veils, ("_You must believe in G.o.d_, _for you are good_!"), O sister who made holy with your kiss, Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of March There in the hideous infamous London streets My cheek, and made my soul a sacred place, O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep!

THE NEW LOCKSLEY HALL.

"FORTY YEARS AFTER."

Comrade, yet a little further I would go before the night Closes round and chills in darkness all the glorious sunset light- Yet a little, by the cliff there, till the stately home I see Of the man who once was with us, comrade once with you and me!

Nay, but leave me, pa.s.s alone there; stay awhile and gaze again On the various-jewelled waters and the dreamy southern main, For the evening breeze is sighing in the quiet of the hills Moving down in cliff and terrace to the singing sweet sea-rills, While the river, silent-stealing, thro' the copse and thro' the lea Winds her waveless way eternal to the welcome of the sea.

Yes, within that green-clad homestead, gardened grounds and velvet ease Of a home where culture reigneth and the chambers whisper peace, Is the man, the seer and singer, who (ah, years and years away!) Lifted up a face of gladness at the breaking of the day.

For the noontide's desperate ardours that had seen the Roman town Wrap the boy Keats, "by the hungry generations trodden down,"

In his death-shroud with the ashes of the fairy child of storm, Fluttering skylark in the breakers, caught and smothered by the foam, And had closed those eyes heroic, weary for the final peace.

Byron maimed and maddened, strangled in the anguish that was Greece- For this noontide pa.s.sed to darkness, brooding doubt and wild dismay, Where the silly sparrows chirruped and the eagles swooped away, Till once more the trampled Peoples and the murdered soul of man Raised a haggard face half-wondering where the new-born day began, Where the sign of Faith's renewal, Faith's, and Hope's, and Love's, outgrew In the golden sun arising; and we hailed it, we and you!

O you hailed it, and your heart beat, and your pretty woman's lays, In the fathomless vibration of our rapturous amaze, Died for ever on your harpstrings, and you rose and struck a chord High, full, clear, heroic, G.o.dlike, "for the glory of the Lord!"

n.o.ble words you spoke; we listened; and we dreamed the day had come When the faith of G.o.d and Christ should sound one cry with Man's freedom- When the men who stood beside us, eager with h.e.l.l's troops to cope, Radiant, thrilled exultant, proud, with the magnificence of hope!

"Forward! forward!" ran our watch-word. "Forward! forward!" by our side You gave back the glorious summons. Would that day that you had died!

Better lying fallen, death-struck, breathless, bleeding, on your face, With your bright sword pointing onward, dying happy in your place!

Better to have pa.s.sed in spirit from the battle-storm's eclipse With the great Cause in your heart and with the war-shout on your lips!

Better to have fallen charging, having known the n.o.bler time, In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line- Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead, Up the slopes and thro' the smoke-clouds, thro' the dying and the dead, Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout, On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!

O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain That remembered Egypt's flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed again- Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills, And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills.

There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves, (Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of slaves, Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stew Where freedom "broadens down" so slow it stops with lords and you!

O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes, Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times, Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet knights Tilted gaily or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights?

O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best, Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not rest- Men of science, "vivisectors!"-democrats, the "rout of beasts"- Writers, essayists and poets, "Belial's prophets, Moloch's priests!"

Coward, you have made the great refusal? you have won the gilded praise Of the wringers of his heart's-blood from the peasant's sunless days, Of the lord and the land-owner, of the rich man who has bound Labour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the ground, With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had, Crying, "Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them mad!"

Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to take What of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood's sake, Bl.u.s.tering long and loudest at the hideousness and pain These you praise have brought upon us; bl.u.s.tering long and loud again At our agony and anguish in this desperate fight of ours, Grappling with anarch custom and the darkness and the powers!

O begone, then, from among us! Echo not, however faint, Our great watch-word, our great war-shout, sweet and sickly poet-saint!