Works

I.


Dead in the sheep-pen he lies,
Wrapped in an old brown sail.
The smiling blue sea and the skies
Know not sorrow nor wail.

Dragged up out of the hold,
Dead on his last way home,...

He asked me of my friend - "a clever man;
Such various talent, business, journalism;
A pen that might some day have sent out 'leaders'
From our greatest newspapers." - "Yes, all this,...

These Chinese toil and yet they do not starve,
And they obey, and yet they are not slaves.
It is the "free-born" fuddled Englishmen
That grovel rotting in their living graves.
...

(Foo-chow.)


From the bright and blinding sunshine,
From the whirling locust's song,
Into the dark and narrow fissures
Of the streets I am borne along.

Here and there dusky-beaming...

(Min River, Fo Kien.)


Up in the misty morning,
Up past the gardened hills,
With the rhythmic stroke of the rowers,
While the blue deep pales and thrills!
...

(Foo-chow.)


"Yes, I used always to think
That you Russians knew
How to make the good drink
As none others do.

"And I thought moreover,
(Not with the epicures),...

Shrieks out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire
That is not quenched but hath for only fruit
What writhes and dies not in its rotten root:
Two things made flesh, the visible desire...

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....

Had you lived when a tyrant king
Strove to make all the slaves of one,
With nobles and with churchmen you
Had stood unflinching, pure and true,
To annihilate that hateful thing...

'Tis not when I am here,
In these homeless homes,
Where sin and shame and disease
And foul death comes;

'Tis not when heart and brain
Would be still and forget
Men and women and children...

. . . They caught them at the bend. He and his son
Sat in the car, revolvers in their laps.
From either side the stone-walled wintry road
There flashed thin fire-streaks in the rainy dusk....

Yes, let Art go, if it must be
That with it men must starve -
If Music, Painting, Poetry
Spring from the wasted hearth.

Pluck out the flower, however fair,
Whose beauty cannot bloom,...

Aloll in the warm clear water,
On her back with languorous limbs,
She lies. The baby upon her breasts
Paddles and falls and swims.

With half-closed eyes she smiles,
Guarding it with her hands;...

Do you want to hear a story
With a nobler praise than "glory,"
Of a man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like hell?
Then, that story let me tell you
Once again, though it as well you...

Sir, we approve your curling lip and nose
At this vile sight.
These men, these women are brute beasts? - Who knows,
Sir, but that you are right?

Panders and harlots, rogues and thieves and worse,...

[The spectacle of the life of the London Dock labourers is one of the most terrible examples of the logical outcome of the present social system. In the six great metropolitan docks over 100,000 men are employed, the great bulk...

. . . One rises now and speaks: "The Cause is one -
Labour o'er all the earth! Shan't we, then, share
With these, whose very flesh and blood's our own,
All that we can of what we have and are?
...

I see a land of desperate droughts and floods:
I see a land where need keeps spreading round,
And all but giants perish in the stress:
I see a land where more, and more, and more...

SHE. - "Up and down, up and down,
From early eve to early day.
Life is quicker in the town;
When you've leisure, anyway!

"Down and up, down and up!
O will no one stop and speak?...

"What, are you lost, my pretty little lady?
This is no place for such sweet things as you.
Our bodies, rank with sweat, will make you sicken,
And, you'll observe, our lives are rank lives too."
...