Works

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...

"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."
...

This is a leader's tent. "Who gathers here?"
Enter and see and listen. On the ground
Men sit or stand, enter or disappear,
Dark faces and deep voices all around.
...

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...

"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;...

In that rich archipelago of sea
With fiery hills, thick woods wherein the mias {79a}
Browses along the trees, and god-like men
Leave monuments of speech too large for us, {79b}...

Australia listened! Through the brawling game
Of played-out rascals gambling for her gold,
The rotten-hearted traitors who had sold
For flimsy English gauds her righteous fame -...

I saw them as they were born,
Erect and fearless and free,
Facing the sun and the wind
Of the hills and the sea.

I saw them naked, superb,
Like the Greeks long ago,...

I stood in Pere-la-Chaise. The putrid city,
Paris, the harlot of the nations, lay,
The bug-bright thing that knows not love nor pity,
Flashing her bare shame to the summer's day.
...

. . . 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...

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,...

"Take with all my heart, friend, this,
The labour of my past,
Though the heart here hidden is
And the soul's eternities
Hold the present fast.

"Take it, still, with soul and heart,...

Take, then, your paltry Christ,
Your gentleman God.
We want the carpenter's son,
With his saw and hod.

We want the man who loved
The poor and oppressed,
Who hated the rich man and king...