Chapter 6

But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den, And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men, Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see, From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came perpetually-- Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing, some crying, Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead and the dying Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.

Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain, And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain-- How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood, And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood. And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit, And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth of it In the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel's devouring breath That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.

And once again as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on, I saw the shape of the Idol like a king turned carrion, Yet crowned and more terrific thus for his human fleshly loss, And with one clenched hand he brandished a lash, and the other held up a cross! And all around the Altar were seated, joyous and free, In garments richly-coloured and choice, a goodly company, Eating and drinking and wantoning, like gods that scorned to know Of the thundering great Machinery and the crowds and the Pit below.

Ah, Christ! the sights and the sounds there that every hour befell Would wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell, But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease-- Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease; Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire; Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in the mire; Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been, Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine!

And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight, At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of might, When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise, Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies. But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say, For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day. But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel, The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence fell.

Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an eye-- A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry: "Enough, enough! It has had enough! We will march no more till we drop In the furnace Pit. Give us food! Give us rest! Though the accursed Machinery stop!" And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their feet, And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet. And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod. And "Stop the Machinery!" he yelled, "you might as well stop God!"

But the terrible thunder-cry replied: "If this indeed must be, It is YOU should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine--not WE!" And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight, And all the aerial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of might, And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overhead The great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge, blood-red! But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see or know, Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flow Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe!

DIRGE. (_Brisbane_.) "_A little Soldier of the Army of the Night_."

Bury him without a word! No appeal to death; Only the call of the bird And the blind spring's breath.

Nature slays ten, yet the one Reaches but to a part Of what's to be done, to be sung. Keep we a proud heart!

Let us not glose her waste With lies and dreams; Fawn on her wanton haste, Say it but seems.

Comrades, with faces unstirred, Scorning grief's dole, Though with him, with him lies interred Our heart and soul,

Bury him without a word! No appeal to death; Only the call of the bird And the blind spring's breath.

TO QUEEN VICTORIA IN ENGLAND. AN ADDRESS ON HER JUBILEE YEAR.

Madam, you have done well! Let others with praise unholy, Speech addressed to a woman who never breathed upon earth, Daub you over with lies or deafen your ears with folly, I will praise you alone for your actual imminent worth. Madam, you have done well! Fifty years unforgotten Pass since we saw you first, a maiden simple and pure. Now when every robber landlord, capitalist rotten, Hated oppressors, praise you--Madam, we are quite sure!

Never once as a foe, open foe, to the popular power, As nobler kings and queens, have you faced us, fearless and bold: No, but in backstairs fashion, in the stealthy twilight hour, You have struggled and struck and stabbed, you have bartered and bought and sold! Melbourne, the listless liar, the gentleman blood-beslavered, Disraeli, the faithless priest of a cynical faith out-worn, These were dear to your heart, these were the men you favoured. Those whom the People loved were fooled and flouted and torn!

Never in one true cause, for your people's sake and the light's sake, Did you strike one honest blow, did you speak one noble word: No, but you took your place, for the sake of wrong and the night's sake, Ever with blear-eyed wealth, with the greasy respectable herd. Not as some robber king, with a resolute minister slave to you, {110} Did you swagger with force against us to satisfy your greed: No, but you hoarded and hid what your loyal people gave to you, Golden sweat of their toil, to keep you a queen indeed!

Pure at least was your bed? pure was your Court?--We know not. Were the white sepulchres pure? Gather men thorns of grapes? Your sons and your blameless spouse's, certes, as Galahads show not. Round you gather a crowd of bloated hypocrite shapes! Never, sure, did one woman produce in such sixes and dozens Such intellectual _canaille_ as this that springs from you; Sons, daughters, grandchildren, with uncles, aunts, and cousins, Not a man or a woman among them--a wretched crew!

Madam, you have done well! You have fed all these to repletion-- You have put a gilded calf beside a gilded cow, And bidden men and women behold the forms of human completion-- Albert the Good, Victoria the Virtuous, for ever--and now! But what to you were our bravest and best, man of science and poet, Struggling for Light and Truth, or the Women who would be free? Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Arnold? We know it-- Tennyson slavers your hand; Argyll fawns at your knee!

Good, you were good, we say. You had no wit to be evil. Your purity shines serene over Floras mangled and dead. You wasted not our substance in splendour, in riot or revel-- You quietly sat in the shade and grew fat on our wealth instead. Madam, you have done well! To you, we say, has been given A wit past the wit of women, a supercomputable worth. Of you we can say, if not "of such are the Kingdom of Heaven," Of such (alas for us!), of such are the Kingdom of Earth!

FAREWELL TO THE CHILDREN.

In the early summer morning I stand and watch them come, The children to the school-house; They chatter and laugh and hum.

The little boys with satchels Slung round them, and the girls Each with hers swinging in her hand; I love their sunny curls.

I love to see them playing, Romping and shouting with glee, The boys and girls together, Simple, fearless, free.

I love to see them marching In squads, in file, in line, Advancing and retreating, Tramping, keeping time.

Sometimes a little lad With a bright brave face I'll see, And a wistful yearning wonder Comes stealing over me.

For once I too had a darling; I dreamed what he should do, And surely he'd have had, I thought, Just such a face as you.

And I, I dreamed to see him Noble and brave and strong, Loving the light, the lovely, Hating the dark, the wrong,--

Loving the poor, the People, Ready to smile and give Blood and brain to their service, For them to die or live!

No matter, O little darlings! Little boys, you shall be My citizens for faithful labour, My soldiers for victory!

Little girls, I charge you Be noble sweethearts, wives, Mothers--comrades the sweetest, Fountains of happy lives!

Farewell, O little darlings! Far away,--with strangers, too-- He sleeps, the little darling, I dreamed to see like you.

And I, O little darlings, I have many miles to go, And where I too may stop and sleep, And when, I do not know.

But I charge you to remember The love, the trust I had, That you'd be noble, fearless, free, And make your country glad!

That you should toil together, Face whatever yet shall be, My citizens for faithful labour, My soldiers for victory!

I charge you to remember; I bless you with my hand, And I know the hour is coming When you shall understand:

When you shall understand too, Why, as I said farewell, Although my lips were smiling, The shining tears down fell.

EPODE. "_On the Ranges_, _Queensland_."

Beyond the night, down o'er the labouring East, I see light's harbinger of dawn released: Upon the false gleam of the ante-dawn, Lo, the fair heaven of day-pursuing morn!

Beyond the lampless sleep and perishing death That hold my heart, I feel my new life's breath, I see the face my spirit-shape shall have When this frail clay and dust have fled the grave.

_Beyond the night_, _the death of doubt_, _defeat_, _Rise dawn and morn_, _and life with light doth meet_, _For the great Cause_, _too_,--_sure as the sun yon ray_ _Shoots up to strike the threatening clouds and say_; "_I come_, _and with me comes the victorious Day_!"

* * * * *

When I was young, the muse I worshipped took me, Fearless, a lonely heart, to look on men. "'Tis yours," said she, "to paint this show of them Even as they are!" Then smiling she forsook me.

Wherefore with passionate patience I withdrew, With eyes from which all loves, hates, hopes, and fears, Joys aureole, and the blinding sheen of tears, Were purged away. And what I saw I drew.

Then, as I worked remote, serene, alone, A child-girl came to me and touched my cheek, And lo her lips were pale, her limbs were weak, Her eyes had thirst's desire and hunger's moan.

She said: "I am the soul of this sad day Where thousands toil and suffer hideous Crime, Where units rob and mock the empty time With revel and rank prayer and deaths display!"

I said: "O child, how shall I leave my songs, My songs and tales, the warp and subtle woof Of this great work and web, in your behoof To strive and passionately sing of wrongs?

"Child, is it nothing that I here fulfil My heart and soul? that I may look and see Where Homer bends and Shakspere smiles on me, And Goethe praises the unswerving will?"

She hung her head, and straight, without a word, Passed from me. And I raised my conscious face To where, in beauteous power in her place, She stood, the muse, my muse, and watched and heard.

Her proud and marble brow was faintly flushed; Upon her flawless lips, and in her eyes A mild light flickered as the young sunrise, Glad, sacred, terrible, serene and hushed.

Then I cried out, and rose with pure wrath wild, Desperate with hatred of Fate's slavery And this cold cruel demon. With that cry, I left her, and sought out the piteous child.

"_Darling_, _'tis nothing that I shed and weep_ _These tears of fire that wither all the heart_, _These bloody sweats that drain and sear and smart_, _I love you_, _and you'll kiss me when I sleep_!"

* * * * *

THE END.

* * * * *

AUSTRALIAN PRESS NOTICES.

"This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power, inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of course, excepting the complete 'Poetical Works' of the same author). _That_ is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,

This putrid death, This flesh-feast of the few, This social structure of red mud, This edifice of slime, Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood, Whose pinnacle is crime!

Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell 'of our own manufacture,' whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old village by the Thames--(trade mark, 'Commerce and Christ.')"--SYDNEY JEPHCOTT, "_Australian Standard_."

AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

"Francis Adams is about the least Australian of the Australian poets. There is in his work lack of wattle-bloom and waratah, rollicking rhyme and galloping jingle. There is much of old-world problems and old-world troubles, which are old-world simply because we here have not had time enough to breed the fever germ to a ravaging pestilence. We have, however, the fever germ, and Francis Adams does our young country yeoman service in awakening a fear for the future in his latest book of poems, 'Songs of the Army of the Night.' The book is not all night though. It is a cantata without music. The first part is all gloom; angry threatening clouds bar out the light of the coming dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen plash along in the mud and darkness; the lightning of angry steel, gleaming phosphorescent in the night; the hoarse hum of famished millions moiling along with a dim yearning for a bloody vengeance, contribute the details of a grim picture of realistic misery. The first part deserves the title given to the whole book, 'Songs of the Army of the Night.' The third part is perturbed and stormy, the sea heaving and surging after a tempest; but already the day is breaking, and young hope is felt in the warmth of the sun's first rays. The third part might be justly termed 'Songs of the Dawn.' The second part is hot and heavy with the languorous heat of the tropics. . . . The whole book is a hymn in praise of fodder. The people march hungry, hoarse with lack of sustenance, gripping their firelocks with feverish, skeleton hands, glaring fiercely with famished eyes towards the granaries of the wealthy. . . . This is the sermon of Nature: 'If you would be good, eat.' It is in the first part that we hear the trumpet-blast of the social message. Here the verses throb with a realistic agony, a lyric Zolaism, that chains the eyes to the page with a virile fascination. It is so simple, too--the coarse, strong meat of the poetry of first principles. The lines are hot and fervid; the poet's pulses keep time with the great heart of human woe. This is socialism in verse, anarchism in the guise of a Grecian statue. 'Outside London' breathes thick and heavy with the vapours of gutterdom. It is despair, hunger, prophecy, hate, revenge. Francis Adams, a ripe and true scholar, in this shows his devotion to truth and to art. The traditions of classicism are in this volume thrown to the winds. The poet's muse is a glorified street trull, a Cassandra of the slums, a draggle-tailed Menad from Whitechapel, and her voice is thick and frenzied with shouting at the barricades. 'The Evening Hymn in the Hovels,' 'Hagar,' 'To the Girls of the Unions,' 'In the Edgware Road,' 'In Trafalgar Square,' 'Aux Ternes,' 'One among so many,' 'The New Locksley Hall,' 'To the Christians,' voice in passionate, simple people's lyrics the socialism which is always felt in strong under-currents by a nation before it appears in literary form, but which is only on the eve of bursting forth and overwhelming everything with its fury, when it does appear in literary form. Rosseau, Voltaire, and Diderot ushered in the French Revolution; in similar fashion the English Revolution is heralded by William Morris and Francis Adams."--F. J. BROOMFIELD, Sydney _Bulletin_.

"DAWNWARDS?"

_To the Author of the_ "_Songs of the Army of the Night_."

We--who, encircled in sleepless sadness With ears laid close to the Austral earth, Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness, Of hopeless anguish and murd'rous mirth Beneath all noise of maudlin gladness Awail, environ the world's wide girth--

Almost arise with Hope's keen urging When out the vasty and night-bound North Red rays ascend, and Songs resurging Through all the darkness and chill, come forth!

The comet climbs until it scorches The sacred dais that skies the great, Until it gleams on palace porches, Where blissful aeons-to-be hold state-- Fades, and we know it one of the torches Madmen a moment elevate!

And, closer clutching the earth, our sorrow Doth then with desperate murmur cry, "We ne'er shall see or morn or morrow! For never star doth scale the sky,

"All men made wise through midnight sable To lead where, safe after all annoy, Sleep soft in earth's Augean stable The virgin "_Justice_," the infant "_Joy_!"-- Grant this, O Father, being able, Or else in merciful might destroy

"This orb whose past and present, awful Alike, attest it a torture wheel, Where, bound by holy men and lawful, Man's body's broken with bars of steel!"

But when we pause, despairing wholly, As a storm that strengthens out on the sea, The far-flown SONGS come sounding slowly! As sea-birds kindle that sweep alee New hopes, old yearnings winging slowly From breast to bosom for shelter flee!

And scarce we know, as there they hover And our blood beats 'neath their beating wings, If 'tis an old dream earthed over Or new bird-ballad that stirs and sings!

But truth's Tyrtaeus is now our neighbour, And strives to waken the slumbering South With peal and throb of trump and tabour And sobbing songs of his mournful mouth To see where Life's all-giver, Labour, Lies fettered, famished and dumb with drouth.

SYDNEY JEPHCOTT, Brisbane _Boomerang_, 25th January 1888.

NOTES.

{27} In _The New Arcadia_ Miss Robinson devoted to the Cause of Labour a dilettante little book that had not even one note of the true, the sweet and lovely poetry of her deeper impulses. There is the amateur, and the female amateur, no less in perception and emotion than in the technical aspects of our art, and we want no more flimsy "sympathetic" rigmaroles, like "The Cry of the Children," or "A Song for the Ragged Schools of London," from those who, in the portraiture of the divine simple woman's soul within them, can give us poetry complete, genuine, everlasting.

{32} His attack on George Eliot in "Fiction, Fair and Foul," in the _Nineteenth Century_, for instance.

{33} The attack on Missionary Ridge is an example of the brilliant initiative, as the holding of the Bloody Angle in the Wilderness is of the dauntless resolution, of the army of the Democracy of the United States, while the last attacks on Richmond were the final exploit of the conqueror of two combatants, of whom it is enough to say that they were worthy of one another.

{35} Something like an adequate account of this great _revolution manquee_, which in England and 1381 went near to anticipating France and 1793, has at last found its place in the historian's pages, and Longland the poet, Ball the preacher, and Tyler the man of action, who first raised for us the democratic demand, can be seen somewhat as they were. This, and more, we owe to John Richard Green. An account of the Revolt will be found in section 4 of chapter 5 of his "Short History of the English People." The phrases in verses 3 and 5 were catchwords among the revolters.

{36} After dismissing the peasants with the formally written acknowledgment of their freedom and rights, Richard II. with an army of 40,000 followers avenged himself and his lords by ruthless and prolonged massacres over the whole country.

{38} Who owns, and rack-rents, some of the vilest slums in London, and is beautifully aesthetic in private life.

{39a} The French.

{39b} "Voe victis!" woe to the conquered--the motto of the Gauls in Rome as of the modern Civilization of Land and Capital.

{44} France.

{45} In Pere-la-Chaise, the famous Parisian cemetery, the Communists made a desperate stand, but were overcome and the captured ones shot. And Morny's vaulted tomb was close at hand, and Balzac smiled his animal cynicism from his bust. Victims, murderer, and commenting Chorus, all were there.

{46} A part of Paris.

{49} The New Model is the name by which is known that reorganization of the Roundhead Army, without which Cromwell saw that the Cavaliers could not be conquered. No one was permitted in its ranks who did not thoroughly believe in the Cause for which it fought.

{66} This graveyard, one side of a gully, which suddenly expands and leaves its base large enough for the local race-course, is in summer one of the loveliest spots on earth. Hindoos, Protestants, Catholics, and Mahommadan have their separate portions. Here in regimental or individual tombs are the record of noble lives thrown away in the iniquity of the English relations with China.

{69a} The Russian tea-urn.

{69b} In China the system of Trades Unions is admirable.--Coolie is the generic term in the East for labourer.

{70} This is one of the three well-known colossi of Gautama, the Buddha. The same type of proud patience marks this embodiment of the suffering East, wherever we meet it.

{76} Dr Moorhouse came out to Melbourne as bishop in the Church of England there in 1876. He almost immediately took the position of the leading religious personality in Australia. To a rare geniality he added the gifts of a "scholar" and a "gentleman," both real and both as modern as yet seems permitted to the old caste and religion. He achieved an influence over men of all denominations, and of none, that was quite phenomenal, and might have been used for a national object as great as good. The work of his diocese, however, proving too much for his strength, he announced the fact, and declared that, unless his bishopric were divided, he would be compelled to resign it. Shortly afterwards he accepted the bishopric of Manchester, on the ground that "a larger sphere of labour had been offered to him unsolicited." His departure was a sort of national event.

{79a} Orang-utan.

{79b} The Buddhistic temple in Java, known as the temple of Borobodo.