Works

In the black night, along the mud-deep roads,
Amid the threatening boughs and ghastly streams,
Hark! sounds that gird the darknesses like goads,
Murmurs and rumours and reverberant dreams,...

"Be with us by day, by night,
O lover, O friend;
Hold before us thy light
Unto the end!

"See, all these children of ours
Starved and ill-clad.
Speak to thy heart's lily-flowers,...

"Men and boys, O fathers, brothers,
Burst these fetters round you bound!
Women, sisters, wives and mothers,
Lift your faces from the ground!

"O Democracy, O People,...

Pure blue flag of heaven
With your silver stars,
Not beside those crosses'
Blood-stained torture-bars:

Not beside the token
The foul sea-harlot gave,
Pure blue flag of heaven,...

. . . I went the other day
To see the birds and beasts they keep enmewed
In the London Zoo. One of the first I saw -
One of the first I noticed, was an eagle.
Ragged, befouled, within his iron bars...

In the dark waveless sea,
Deep blue under deep blue,
The fisher drifts by on the tide
In his small pole-balanced canoe.

Above him the cloud-clapped hills
Crown the dense jungly sweeps;...

Yonder the band is playing
And the fine young people walk.
They are envying each other and talking
Their pretty empty talk.

There, in the shade on the outskirts,
Stretched on the grass, I see...

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...

Here to the parks they come,
The scourings of the town,
Like weary wounded animals
Seeking where to lie them down.

Brothers, let us take together
An easeful period....

Thro' the mists of years,
Thro' the lies of men,
Your bloody sweat and tears,
Your desperate hopes and fears
Reach us once again.

Brothers, who long ago,
For life's bitter sake...

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.
...

Was it for nothing in the years gone by,
O my love, O my friend,
You thrilled me with your noble words of faith? -
Hope beyond life, and love, love beyond death!
Yet now I shudder, and yet you did not die,...

"If you only knew
How gladly I've given it
All these years -
The light of mine eyes,
The heat of my lips,
Mine agonies,
My yearning tears,
My blood that drips,
My brain that sears:...

One thing we praise you for that is past praise -
The dauntless eyes that faced the rain and night,
The hand that never wearied in the fight,
Till, through the dark's despair, the dawn's delays,...

"My sweet, my child, through all this night
Of dark and wind and rain,
Where thunder crashes, and the light
Sears the bewildered brain,

"It is your face, your lips, your eyes
I see rise up; I hear...

We thank you for a noble work well done.
There is a kindness - ('tis the truer one;
The better part the simpler heart doth know),
The care to give the day a brighter sun
...

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...

Not for the thought that burns on keen and clear,
Heat that the heat has turned from red to white,
The passion of the lone remembering night
One with the patience day must see and hear -...

"Teach me, love, to be true;
Teach me, love, to love;
Teach me to be pure like you.
It will be more than enough!

"Ah, and in days to come,
Give me, my seraph, too,
A son nobler than I,...

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,...