We saw a vision, and our blood
Beat red and hot and strong:
"Lead us (we cried)
to war against
Some foul, embattled wrong!"We dreamed a Warrior whose sword
Was edged for sham and shame;
We dreamed a Statesman far above
The vulgar lust for fame.
We were not cynics, and we dreamed
A Man who made no truce
With lies nor ancient privilege
Nor old, entrenched abuse.
We dreamed . . . we dreamed . . . Youth dreamed
a dream!
And even you forgot
Yourself, one moment, and dreamed, too--
Struck, while your mood was hot!
Struck three or four good blows . . . and then
Turned back to easier things:
The cheap applause, the blatant mob,
The praise of underlings!
Praise . . . praise . . . was ever man so filled,
So avid still, of praise?
So hungry for the crowd's acclaim,
The sycophantic phrase?
O you whom Greatness beckoned to . . .
O swollen Littleness
Who turned from Immortality
To fawn upon Success!
O blind with love of self, who led
Youth's vision to defeat,
Bawling and brawling for rewards,
Loud, in the common street!
O you who were so quick to judge--
Leader, and loved, of yore--
Hear now the judgment of our youth:
Leader and Chief no more!THE BAYONET
(1914)
THE great guns slay from a league away, the death-
bolts fly unseen,
And bellowing hill replies to hill, machine to brute
machine,
But still in the end when the long lines bend and
the battle hangs in doubt
They take to the steel in the same old way that
their fathers fought it out--
It is man to man and breast to breast and eye
to bloodshot eye
And the reach and twist of the thrusting wrist, as
it was in the days gone by!
Along the shaken hills the guns their drumming
thunder roll--
But the keen blades thrill with the lust to kill
that leaps from the slayer's soul!
For hand and heart and living steel, one pulse of
hate they feel.
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