Chapter 3

"_What's my price_, _sir_? _I'm no Jew_. _If with me you wish to sleep_, _'Tis five francs_, _sir_. _Surely you_ _Will admit that that is cheap_?"

HE.--"Christ, if you are not stone blind, Stone deaf also, you know it is Christian towns leave far behind Sodom and those other cities.

"Bid your Father strike this town, Wipe it utterly away! Weary, hungry, up and down From early eve to early day?

"Magdalen knew nought like this; She had food and roof above; Seven devils, too, did she possess; This poor soul had but one--love!

"O my sister, take me, kill me! I am one of those who once Only cared to feast and fill me On these robbed and murdered ones.

"Kill me? Nay, but love me; listen. I have too a gospel word, Fit to make still, dull eyes glisten, And, like Christ's, it brings a sword!

"No, Christ is not deaf nor blind; He's but dust in Syrian ground, And his Father has declined To a parson's phrase, a sound.

"Not by such, then, but by _us_ These hell-wrongs must be redressed. Take this morsel venomous; Nourish it within your breast.

"You must live on, live and hate; Conquer wrath, despair and pain; For "we bid you hope" and wait Till the Red Flag flies again:

"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 Competition leaves, The least for which brother'll slay brother. He who the fruits of this hell-strife receives, He is a thief, an assassin, 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 assassin-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 Shelleys, what? They stand great famous names, Demi-gods 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 noble yet, Noble and high, the speech of godlike men, When fetters bound it, be they gold or flowers. All that is noblest, 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-gods 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 God would punish me_!"--"And will not God 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 noble_" . . . "Noble? 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 God, a God 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 God_, _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, pass 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 passed 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, godlike, "for the glory of the Lord!" Noble words you spoke; we listened; and we dreamed the day had come When the faith of God and Christ should sound one cry with Man's freedom-- When the men who stood beside us, eager with hell'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 passed 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 nobler 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, Blustering long and loudest at the hideousness and pain These you praise have brought upon us; blustering 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! Sit there dreaming in your gardens, looking out upon the sea, Till the night-time closes round you and the wind is on the lea. Enter then within your chambers in the rich and quiet light; Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night. Soothe your fancy with your visions; bend a gracious senile ear To the praise your guests are murmuring in the tone you love to hear. Honoured of your Queen, and honoured of the gentlest and the best, Lord and commoner and rich-man, smirking tenant, shopman, priest, All distinguished and respectable, the shiny sons of light, O what, O what are these who call you coward in the night? Ay, what are we who struggled for the cause of Science, say, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Hackel, marshalling our stern array? We who raised the cry for Culture, Goethe's spirit leading on, Marching gladly with our captains, Renan, Arnold, Emerson? We, we are not tinkers, tinkers of the kettle cracked and broke, Tailors squatted cross-legged, patching at the greasy worn-out cloak! We are those that faced mad Fortune, cried: "The Truth, and only she! Onward, upward! If we perish, we at least will perish free!" We have lost our souls to win them, in the house and in the street Falling stabbed and poisoned, making a victory of defeat. We have lost the happy present, we have paid death's heavy debt, We have won, have won the Future, and its sons shall not forget! Enter, then, within your chamber in the rich and quiet light; Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night; Spread your nostrils to the incense, hearken to the murmured hymn Of the praising people, rising from the temple fair and dim. Ah, but we here in the tempest, we here struggling in the night, See the worshippers out-stealing; see the temple emptying quite; See the godhead turning ghostlike; see the pride of name and fame Paling slowly, sad and sickly, with forgetfulness and shame! . . . Darker, darker grows the night now, louder, louder cries the wind; I can hear the dash of breakers and the deep sea moves behind, I can see the ghostlike phalanx rushing on the crumbling shore, Slowly but surely shattering its rampart evermore. And my comrade's voice is calling, and his solitary cry On the great dark swift air-currents like Fate's summons sweepeth by. Farewell, then, whom once I loved so, whom a boy I thrilled to hear Urging courage and reliance, loathing acquiescent fear. I must leave you; I must wander to a strange and distant land, Facing all that Fate shall give me with her hard unequal hand-- I once more anew must face them, toil and trouble and disease, But these a man may face and conquer, for there waits him death and peace And the freedom from dishonour and denial e'er confessed Of what he knows is truest, what most beautiful and best! O farewell, then! I must leave you. You have chosen. You are right. You have made the great refusal; you have shunned the wind and night. You have won your soul, and won it--No, not lost it, as they tell-- Happy, blest of gods and monarchs, O a long, a long farewell! _Freshwater_, _Isle of Wight_.

FAREWELL TO THE MARKET. "SUSANNAH AND MARY-JANE."

Two little darlings alone, Clinging hand in hand; Two little girls come out To see the wonderful land!

Here round the flaring stalls They stand wide-eyed in the throng, While the great, the eloquent huckster Perorates loud and long.

They watch those thrice-blessed mortals, The dirty guzzling boys, Who partake of dates, periwinkles, Ices and other joys.

And their little mouths go wide open At some of the brilliant sights That little darlings may see in the road Of Edgware on Saturday nights.

The eldest's name is Susannah; She was four years old last May. And Mary-Jane, the youngest, Is just three years old to-day.

And I know all about their cat, and Their father and mother too, And "Pigshead," their only brother, Who got his head jammed in the flue.

And _they_ know several particulars Of a similar sort of me, For we went up and down together For over an hour, we three.

And Susannah walked beside me, As became the wiser and older, Fast to one finger, but Mary-Jane Sat solemnly up on my shoulder.

And we bought some sweets, and a monkey That climbed up a stick "quite nice." And then last we adjourned for refreshments, And the ladies had each an ice.

And Susannah's ice was a pink one, And she sucked it up so quick, But Mary-Jane silently proffered Her ice to me for a lick.

And then we went home to mother, And we found her upon the floor, And father was trying to balance His shoulders against the door.

And Susannah said "O" and "Please, sir, We'll go in ourselves, sir!" And We kissed one another and parted, And they stole in hand in hand.

And it's O for my two little darlings I never shall see again, Though I stand for the whole night watching And crying here in the rain!

II. "HERE AND THERE."

IN THE PIT. "CHANT OF THE FIREMEN."

"This is the steamer's pit. The ovens like dragons of fire Glare thro' their close-lidded eyes With restless hungry desire.

"Down from the tropic night Rushes the funnelled air; Our heads expand and fall in; Our hearts thump huge as despair.

"'Tis we make the bright hot blood Of this throbbing inanimate thing; And our life is no less the fuel Than the coal we shovel and fling.

"And lest of this we be proud Or anything but meek, We are well cursed and paid-- Ten shillings a week!"

_Round_, _round_, _round in its tunnel_ _The shaft turns pitiless strong_, _While lost souls cry out in the darkness_: "_How long_, _O Lord_, _how long_?"

A MAHOMMADAN SHIP FIREMAN.

Up from the oven pit, The hell where poor men toil, At the sunset hour he comes Clean-clothed, washed from soil.

On the fo'c's'le head he kneels, His face to the hallowed West. He prays, and bows and prays. Does he pray for death and rest?

TO INDIA.

O India, India, O my lovely land-- At whose sweet throat the greedy English snake, With fangs and lips that suck and never slake, Clings, while around thee, band by stifling band, The loathsome shape twists, chaining foot and hand-- O from this death-swoon must thou never wake, From limbs enfranchised these foul fetters to shake, And, proud among the nations, to rise and stand? Nay, but thine eyes, thine eyes wherein there stays The patience of that august faith that scorns The tinsel creed of Christ, dream still and gaze Where, not within the timeless East and haze, The haunt of that wan moon with fading horns, There breaks the first of Himalayan morns!

TO ENGLAND.

I.

There was a time when all thy sons were proud To speak thy name, England, when Europe echoed back aloud Thy fearless fame:

When Spain reeled shattered helpless from thy guns And splendid ire, When from Canadian snows to Indian suns Pitt's soul was fire.

O that in days like these were, fair and free From shame and scorn, Fate had allowed, benignly, pityingly That I was born!

O that, if struck, then struck with glorious wounds, I bore apart (Not torn with fangs of leprous coward hounds) My bleeding heart!

II.

We hate you--not because of cruel deeds Staining a glorious effort. They who live Learn in this earth to give and to forgive, Where heart and soul are noble and fate's needs Imperious: No, nor yet that cruel seeds Of power and wrong you've sown alternative, We hate you, we your sons who yet believe That truth and justice are not empty creeds! No, but because of greed and golden pay, Wages of sin and death: because you smother Your conscience, making cursed all the day. Bible in one hand, bludgeon in the other, Cain-like you come upon and slay your brother, And, kneeling down, thank God for it, and pray!

III.

I whom you fed with shame and starved with woe, I wheel above you, Your fatal vulture, for I hate you so, I almost love you!

I smell your ruin out. I light and croak My sombre lore, As swaggering you go by, O heart of oak Rotten to the core!

Look westward! Ireland's vengeful eyes are cast On freedom won. Look eastward! India stirs from sleep at last. You are undone!

Look southward, where Australia hears your voice, And turns away! O brutal hypocrite, she makes her choice With the rising day!

Foul Esau, you who sold your high birthright For gilded mud, Who did the wrong and, priestlike, called it right, And swindled God!

_The hour is gone of insult_, _pain and patience_; _The hour is come_ _When they arise_, _the faithful mightier nations_, _To drag you down_!

IV.

England, the land I loved With passionate pride, For hate of whom I live Who for love had died,

Can I, while shines the sun, That hour regain When I again may come to thee And love again?

No, not while that flag Of greed and lust Flaunts in the air, untaught To drag the dust!--

Never, till expiant, I see you kneel, And, brandished, gleams aloft The foeman's steel!

Ah, then to speed, and laugh, As my heart caught the knife: "_Mother_, _I love you_! _Here_, _Here is my life_!"

HONG-KONG LYRICS.

I.

At anchor in that harbour of the island, The Chinese gate, We lay where, terraced under green-clad highland, The sea-town sate.

Ships, steamers, sailors, many a flag and nation, A motley crew, Junks, sampans, all East's swarming jubilation, I watched and knew.