Читать книгу Songs of the Army of the Night - Adams Francis William Lauderdale - Страница 5

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.

One answers you.  “You ask who gathers here?

   Companions!  Generals we have none, nor chief.

What need is there?  The plan is all so clear —

  The future’s hope, the present’s grim relief!

“Food for us all, and clothes, and roofs come first.

   The means to gain them?  This, our leaguered band!

The hatred of the robber rich accursed

   Keeps foes together, makes fools understand.

“Beyond the present’s faith, the future’s hope

   Points to the dawning hour when all shall be

But one.  The man condemned shall fit the rope

   Around the hangman’s neck, and both be free!

“The sun then rises on a happier land

   Where Wealth and Labour sound but as one word.

We drill, we train, we arm our leaguered band.

   What is there more to tell you have not heard?”

   Resolute, stern, menacing.  On the ground

They sit or stand, enter or disappear,

   Dark faces and deep voices all around.

Let him who toils, enjoy

   Fruit of his toiling.

Let him whom sweats annoy,

   No more be spoiling.

For we would have it be

   That, weak or stronger,

Not he who works, but he

   Who works not, hunger!

When day’s hard task’s done,

   Eve’s scant meal partaken,

Out we steal each one,

   Weariless, unshaken.

In small reeking squares,

   Garbaged plots, we gather,

Little knots and pairs,

   Brother, sister, father.

Then the word is given.

   In their silent places

Under lowering heaven,

   Range our stern-set faces.

Now we march and wheel

   In our clumsy line,

Shouldering sticks for steel,

   Thoughts like bitter brine!

Drill, drill, drill, and drill!

   It is only thus

Conquer yet we will

   Those who’ve conquered us.

Patience, sisters, mothers!

   We must not forget

Dear dead fathers, brothers;

   They must teach us yet.

In that hour we see,

   The hour of our desire,

What shall their slayers be?

   As the stubble to the fire!

“We sow the fertile seed and then we reap it;

   We thresh the golden grain; we knead the bread.

Others that eat are glad.  In store they keep it,

   While we hunger outside with hearts like lead.

Hallelujah!

“We hew the stone and saw it, rear the city.

   Others inhabit there in pleasant ease.

We have no thing to ask of them save pity,

   No answer they to give but what they please.

Hallelujah!

“Is it for ever, fathers, say, and mothers,

   That we must toil and never know the light?

Is it for ever, sisters, say, and brothers,

   That they must grind us dead here in the night?

Hallelujah!

   Have strength and pleasure of the food we make?

O we who hew, build, deck, shall we not also

   The happiness that we have given partake?

Hallelujah!”

You have done well, we say it.  You are dead,

   And, of the man that with the right hand takes

Less than the left hand gives, let it be said

   He has done something for our wretched sakes.

For those to whom you gave their daily bread

   Rancid with God-loathed “charity,” their drink

Putrid with man-loathed “sin,” we bow our head

   Grateful, as the great hearse goes by, and think.

Yes, you have fed the flesh and starved the soul

   Of thousands of us; you have taught too well

The rich are little gods beyond control,

   Save of your big God of the heaven and hell.

We thank you.  This was pretty once, and right.

Now it wears rather thin.  My lord, good night!

“Liberty!”  Is that the cry, then?

   We have heard it oft of yore.

Once it had, we think, a meaning;

   Let us hear it now no more.

We have read what history tells us

   Of its heroes, martyrs too.

Doubtless they were very splendid,

   But they’re not for me and you.

There were Greeks who fought and perished,

   Won from Persians deathless graves.

Had we lived then, we’re aware that

   We’d have been those same Greeks’ slaves!

Then a Roman came who loved us;

   Cæsar gave men tongues and swords.

Crying “Liberty,” they fought him,

   Cato and his cut-throat lords.

When he’d give a broader franchise,

   Lift the mangled nations bowed,

Crying “Liberty!” they killed him,

   Brutus and his pandar crowd.

We have read what history tells us,

   O the truthful memory clings!

Tacitus, the chartered liar,

   Gloating over poisoned kings!

“Liberty!”  The stale cry echoes

   Past snug homesteads, tinsel thrones,

Over smoking fields and hovels,

   Murdered peasants’ bleaching bones.

That’s the cry that mocked us madly,

   Toiling in our living graves,

When hell-mines sent up the chorus:

   “Britons never shall be slaves!”

“Liberty!”  We care not for it!

   What we care for’s food, clothes, homes,

For our dear ones toiling, waiting

   For the time that never comes!

Will you not buy?  She asks you, my lord, you

   Who know the points desirable in such.

She does not say that she is perfect.  True,

   She’s not too pleasant to the sight or touch.

But then – neither are you!

Her cheeks are rather fallen in; a mist

   Glazes her eyes, for all their hungry glare.

Her lips do not breathe balmy when they’re kissed.

   And yet she’s not more loathsome than, I swear,

Your grandmother at whist.

My lord, she will admit, and need not frame

   Excuses for herself, that she’s not chaste.

First a young lover had her; then she came

   From one man’s to another’s arms, with haste.

Your mother did the same.

Moreover, since she’s married, once or twice

   She’s sold herself for certain things at night,

To sell one’s body for the highest price

   Of social ease and power, all girls think right.

Your sister did it thrice.

What, you’ll not buy?  You’ll curse at her instead? —

   Her children are alone, at home, quite near.

These winter streets, so gay at nights, ’tis said,

   Have ’ticed the wanton out.  She could not hear

Her children cry for bread!

Girls, we love you, and love

   Asks you to give again

That which draws it above,

   Beautiful, without stain.

  Give us weariless faith

In our Cause pure, passionate,

Dearer than life and death,

   Dear as the love that’s it!

Give to the man who turns

   Traitrous hands or forlorn

Back from the plough that burns,

   Give him pitiless scorn!

Let him know that no wife

   Would bear him a fearless child

To hate and loathe the life

   Of a leprous father defiled.

Girls, we love you, and love

   Asks you to give again

That which draws it above,

   Beautiful, without stain!

She went along the road,

   Her baby in her arms.

   The night and its alarms

Made deadlier her load.

Her shrunken breasts were dry;

   She felt the hunger bite.

   She lay down in the night,

She and the child, to die.

But it would wail, and wail,

   And wail.  She crept away.

   She had no word to say,

Yet still she heard the wail.

She took a jaggèd stone;

   She wished it to be dead.

   She beat it on the head;

It only gave one moan.

She has no word to say;

   She sits there in the night.

   The east sky glints with light,

And it is Christmas Day!

“Why is it we toil so?

   Where go all the gains?

What do we produce for it,

   All our pangs and pains?”

Why it is we toil so,

   Is it because, like sheep,

Since our fathers sought the shears,

   We the same course keep.

Where go all the gains?  Well,

   It must be confessed,

First the landlords take the rent,

   And the masters take the rest.

What do we produce for it?

   Gentlemen! – and then

Imitation snobs who’d be

   Like the gentlemen!

“What, is it for such as these

   That we suffer thus?

Fuddle-brained and vicious fools,

   Vermin venomous?

“What, is that why on the top

   Creeps that Royal Louse,

The prince of pheasants and cigars,

   Of ballet-girls and grouse?”

Yes, that’s why, my Christian friends,

   They slave and slaughter us.

England is made a dunghill that

   Some bugs may breed and buzz.

“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.”

“Oh no, I am not lost!  Oh no, I’ve come here

   (And I have brought my lute, see, in my hand),

To see you, and to sing of all you suffer

   To the great world, and make it understand!”

“Well, say!  If one of those who’d robbed you thousands,

   Dropped you a sixpence in the gutter where

You lay and rotted, would you call her angel,

   For all her charming smile and dainty air?”

“Oh no, I come not thus!  Oh no, I’ve come here

   With heart indignant, pity like a flame,

To try and help you!” – “Pretty little lady,

  It will be best you go back whence you came.”

“‘Enthusiasms’ we have such little time for!

   In our rude camp we drill the whole day long.

When we return from out the serried battle,

   Come, and we’ll listen to your pretty song!”

My Lord, at last you have it!  Now we know

Truth’s not a phrase, justice an idle show.

Your life ran red with murder, green with lust.

Blood has washed blood clean, and, in the final dust

Your carrion will be purified.  Yet, see,

Though your body perish, for your soul shall be

An immortality of infamy!

’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

   Dragged down to the pit:

But when I hear them declaiming

   Of “liberty,” “order,” and “law,”

The husk-hearted gentleman

   And the mud-hearted bourgeois,

That a sombre hateful desire

   Burns up slow in my breast

To wreck the great guilty temple,

   And give us rest!

“The foxes have holes,

And the birds of the air have nests,

But where shall the heads of the sons of men

Be laid, be laid?”

“Where the cold corpse rests,

Where the sightless moles

Burrow and yet cannot make it afraid,

Rout but cannot wake it again,

There shall the heads of the sons of men

Be laid, laid!”

Where is poor Jesus gone?

   He sits with Dives now,

And not even the crumbs are flung

   To Lazarus below.

Where is poor Jesus gone?

   Is he with Magdalen?

He doles her one by one

   Her wages of shame!

Where is poor Jesus gone?

   The good Samaritan,

What does he there alone?

   He stabs the wounded man!

Where is poor Jesus gone,

   The lamb they sacrificed?

They’ve made God of his carrion

   And labelled it “Christ!”

“He holds a pistol to my head,

Swearing that he will shoot me dead,

If he have not my purse instead,

          The robber!”

“He, with the lash of wealth and power,

Flogs out my heart and flings the dower,

The plundered pittance of his hour,

          The robber!”

“He shakes his serpent tongue that lies,

Wins trust for poisoned sophistries

And stabs me in the dark, and flies,

          The assassin!”

“He pits me in the dreadful fight

Against my fellow.  Then he quite

Strips both his victims in the night,

          The assassin!”

This is what I pray

In this horrible day,

In this terrible night,

God will give me light.

Such as I have had,

That I go not mad.

This is what I seek,

God will keep me meek

Till mine eyes behold,

Till my lips have told

All this hellish crime. —

Then it’s sleeping time!

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

   And the scribe and the priest.

We want the Galilean

   Who knew cross and rod.

It’s your “good taste” that prefers

   A bastard God!

Who is it speaks of defeat? —

   I tell you a Cause like ours

Is greater than defeat can know;

   It is the power of powers!

As surely as the earth rolls round,

   As surely as the glorious sun

Brings the great world sea-wave,

   Must our Cause be won!

What is defeat to us? —

   Learn what a skirmish tells,

While the great Army marches on

   To storm earth’s hells!

Yes, you do well to mock us, you

   Who knew our bitter woe —

To jeer the false, deny the true

   In us blind struggling low,

While, on your pleasant place aloft

   With flowers and clouds and streams,

At our black sweat and toil you scoffed

   That marred your idle dreams.

“Oh, freedom, what was that to us,”

(You’d shout down to us there),

“Except the freedom foul, vicious,

   From all of good and fair?

“Obedience, faith, humility,

   To us were empty names.” —

The like to you (might we reply)

   Whose noisy life proclaims

Presumption, want of human love,

   Impatience, filthy breath, 2

The snob in soul who looks above,

   Trampling on what’s beneath.

When did you strive, in nobler part,

   With love and gentleness,

To help one soul, to win one heart

   To joy and hope and peace?

Go to, vain prophet, without faith

   In God who maketh new,

With hankerings for 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’s blood,

   Whose pinnacle is Crime! —

Go to, for we who strain our power

   For light and warmth and scope,

For wives’, for children’s happier hour,

   Can teach you faith and hope.

Hark to the shout of those who cleared

   The Missionary Ridge!

Look on those dead who never feared

   The battle’s bloody bridge!

Watch the stern swarm at that last breach

   March up that came not thence —

And learn Democracy can teach

   Divine obedience. 3

Pass through that South at last brought low

   Where loyal freemen live,

And learn Democracy knows how

   To utterly forgive.

Come then, and take this free-given bread

   Of us who’ve scarce enough;

Hush your proud lips, bow down your head

   And worship human love!

You are at least a man, of men a king.

   You have a heart, and with that heart you love.

   The race you come from is not gendered of

The filthy sty whose latest litter cling

Round England’s flesh-pots, gorged and gluttoning.

   No, but on flaming battle-fields, in courts

   Of honour and of danger old resorts,

The name of Hohen-Zollern clear doth ring.

O Father William, you, not falsely weak,

   Who never spared the rod to spoil the child,

Our mighty Germany, we only speak

   To bless you with a blessing sweet and mild,

Ere that near heaven your weary footsteps seek

   Where love with liberty is reconciled.

“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,

   And make them glad!

“Our wives and daughters are here,

   Knowing wrong and shame’s touch

Bid them be of good cheer

   Who have lovèd much.

“And we, we are robbed and oppressed,

   Even as thine were.

Tell us of comfort and rest,

   Banish despair!

“Be with us by day, by night,

   O lover, O friend;

Hold before us thy light

   Unto the end!”

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,

(However sweet it be, or rare)

   Save from a noisome tomb.

These social manners, charm and ease,

   Are hideous to who knows

The degradation, the disease

   From which their beauty flows.

So, Poet, must thy singing be;

   O Painter, so thy scene;

Musician, so thy melody,

   While misery is queen.

Nay, brothers, sing us battle-songs

   With clear and ringing rhyme;

Nay, show the world its hateful wrongs,

   And bring the better time!

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

Toiled and suffered so,

Robbery, insult, blow,

   Rope and sword and stake:

Toiled and suffered, till

   It burst, the brightening hope,

“Might and right” and “will and skill,”

That scorned, and does, and will,

   Sword and stake and rope!

Wat and Jack and John,

   Tyler, Straw, and Ball,

Souls that faltered not,

Hearts like white iron hot,

   Still we hear your call!

Yes, your “bell is rung,”

   Yes, for “now is time!”

Come hither, every one,

Brave ghosts whose day’s not done,

   Avengers of old rime, —

Come and lead the way,

   Hushed, implacable,

Suffering no delay,

Forgetting not that day

   Dreadful, hateful, fell,

When the liar king,

   The liar gentlemen,

Wrought that foulest thing,

Robbing, murdering

   Men who’d trusted them! 5

Come and lead the way,

   Hushed, implacable.

What shall stop us, say,

On that day, our day? —

   Not unloosened hell!

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

   Green Runnymeade beat out of John?

Had you lived when a wanton crew,

   Flash scoundrels of a day outdone,

Trod down the toilers birth derides,

With Cromwell and his Ironsides

The brave days had discovered you,

   Where Naseby saw the gallants run?

And yet you, – this same knight in list

   For freedom in her narrow dawn

Against that one, against those few,

Vile king, vile nobles – you, yet you

Stand by the bloody Capitalist,

   Fight with the pandar Gentleman!

The stars shone faint through the smoky blue;

   The church-bells were ringing;

Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,

   Tramping and singing.

Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung

   As they went along;

Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung

   Their defiant song.

It was not too clean, their feminine lay,

   But it thrilled me quite

With its challenge to task-master villainous day

   And infamous night,

With its threat to the robber rich, the proud,

   The respectable free.

And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,

   And they shouted to me!

“Girls, that’s the shout, the shout we shall utter

   When with rifles and spades,

We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter,

   On the barricades!”

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,

   We are a crew

Whose pitiful plunder’s honoured in the purse

   Of gentlemen like you.

Whom holy Competition’s taught (like us)

   “What’s thine is mine!” —

How we must love you who have made us thus,

   You may perhaps divine!

Man of despair and death,

Bought and slaved in the gangs,

Starved and stripped and left

To the pitiful pitiless night,

Away with your selfish thoughts!

Touch not your ignorant life!

Are there no masters of slaves,

Jeering, cynical, strong —

Are there no brigands (say),

With the words of Christ on their lips

And the daggers under their cloaks —

Is there not one of these

That you can steal on and kill?

O as the Swiss mountaineer

Dogged on the perilous heights

His disciplined conqueror foes: 7

Caught up one in his arms

And, laughing exultantly,

Plunged with him to the abyss:

So let it be with you!

An eye for an eye, and a tooth

For a tooth, and a life for a life!

Tell it, this hateful strong

Contemptuous hypocrite world,

Tell it that, if we must live

As dogs and as worse than dogs,

At least we can die like men!

Tell it there is a woe

Not for the conquered alone! 8

An eye for an eye, and a tooth

For a tooth, and a life for a life!

In the chill grey summer dawn-light

   We pass through the empty streets;

The rattling wheels are all silent;

   No friend his fellow greets.

Here and there, at the corners,

   A man in a great-coat stands;

A bayonet hangs by his side, and

   A rifle is in his hands.

This is a conquered city;

   It speaks of war not peace;

And that’s one of the English soldiers

   The English call “police.”

You see, at the present moment

   That noble country of mine

Is boiling with indignation

   At the memory of a “crime.”

In a path in the Phœnix Park where

   The children romped and ran,

An Irish ruffian met his doom,

   And an English gentleman.

For a hundred and over a hundred

   Years on the country side

Men and women and children

   Have slaved and starved and died,

That those who slaved and starved them

   Might spend their earnings then,

And the Irish ruffians have a “good time,”

   And the English gentlemen.

And that’s why at the present moment

   That noble country of mine

Is boiling with indignation

   At the memory of a “crime.”

For the Irish ruffians (they tell me),

   And it looks as if ’twere true,

And the English gentlemen are so scarce,

   We could not spare those two!

In the chill grey summer dawn-light

   We pass through the empty streets;

The rattling wheels are all silent;

   No friend his fellow greets.

Here and there, at the corners,

   A man in a great-coat stands;

A bayonet hangs by his side, and

   A rifle is in his hands.

This is a conquered city;

   It speaks of war not peace;

And that’s one of the English soldiers

   The English call “police.”

..  I went the other day

To see the birds and beasts they keep enmewed