Songs of the Army of the Night

“‘Tyranny’?  Yes, that’s it!   We are not afraidTo face the word that’s fit   For what we’ve said!“It’s the tyranny of the Many,   That will not allowThere’s the right to any   To seek wealth and power now“At the expense of the Many.   Say, that one or thisWorks ‘over hours’: then he   Drives us all to the abyss,“Where, struggling together   One rises againWhile the rest all together   Are stifled and slain.“From this death-strife of brothers   Comes the tyranny of One.That’s your sort.  But we others,   We prefer our own!”FROM A VERANDAH(Sydney.)“Armageddon.”O city lapped in sun and Sabbath rest,With happy face of plenteous ease possessed,   Have you no doubts that whisper, dreams that moanDisquietude, to stir your slumbering breast?   Think you the sins of other climes are gone?   The harlot’s curse rings in your streets – the groanOf out-worn men, the stabbed and plundered slaves   Of ever-growing Greed, these are your own!O’er you shall sweep the fiery hell that cravesFor quenchment the bright blood of human waves:   For you, if you repent not, shall atoneFor Greed’s dark death-holes with War’s swarming graves!“ELSIE:”A MemoryLittle elfin maid,   Old, though scarce two years,With your big dark hazel eyes   Tenderer than tears,And your rosebud mouth   Lisping jocund things,Breaking brooding silence with   Wistful questionings!Like a flower you grew   While life’s bright sun shone.Does the greedy spendthrift earth   Heed a flower is gone?No; but Love’s fond ken,   That gropes through Death’s strange ways,Almost seems to hear your Voice,   Seems to see your Face!“NATIONALISM AND M‘ILWRAITH!”The Queensland Elections Cry, 1888Australia listened!  Through the brawling game   Of played-out rascals gambling for her gold,   The rotten-hearted traitors who had soldFor flimsy English gauds her righteous fame —Through the foul hubbub, it did seem, there came   The still small voice of nobler things untold.   But now, but now with wonder manifoldShe hears a voice that calls her by her name!Australia listens, as the mother wilt   To hear her first-born cry.  “Say, is it death,Or life and all life’s hope made audible   That thrills my heart and gives my spirit faith?”From out the gathering war-hosts leaps forth shrill   The double cry, “Australia, M‘Ilwraith!”The dawn is breaking northward!  Rise, O Sun,   Australian Liberty, and give us light!   And thou who through the dark and doubtful nightWith great clear eyes of patience looking onEven to that splendid hour Republican,   O know what things are with thee in the fight —   What hope and trust, what truth, what right, what mightTo never leave this work till it be done!Not as these others were, the helpless slaves   Of each diurnal need and cringing debt,   Australia’s statesman, have we known thee yet! —The world’s great heroes call from a thousand graves:   “Thy land, a nation, cries to thee to be setFree as the freedom of her ocean waves!”TO THE EMPEROR WILLIAM

London, May 15, 1889. – “The promised interview with the Emperor William was granted to-day to the delegates from the coal-miners now on strike in Westphalia; but the audience lasted for only ten minutes. The men asked that the Emperor would inquire into the merits of their case and the hardships under which they suffered. His Majesty replied that he was already inquiring into the matter. He then warned the miners that he would employ all his great powers to repress socialistic agitation and intrigue. If the slightest resistance was shown he would shoot every man so offending. On the other hand, he promised to protect them if peaceable.” —

Cablegram.Son of a Man and grandson of a Man,   Mannikin most miserable in thy shrunken shape   And peevish, shrivelled-soul, is’t thou wouldst apeThe thunder-bearer of Fate’s blustering clan?Know, then, that never, since the years began,   The terrible truth was surer of this word:   “Who takes the sword, shall perish by the sword!”For mankind’s nod makes mannikin and man.Surely it was not shed too long ago,That Emperor’s blood that stained the Northern snow,   O thou King Stork aspiring that art King Log,   Wild-boar that wouldst be, reeking there all hog;To teach thy brutish brainlessness to know   Those who pulled down a lion can shoot a dog.A STORY(For the Irish Delegates in Australia.)   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 youKnow as I – the splendid story of the man they call Parnell!   By the wayside of the nations,   Lashed with whips and execrations,Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying, she, the Maiden Nation, lay;   And the burthen of dishonour   Weighed so grievously upon herThat her very children hid their eyes and crept in shame away.   And there as she was lying   Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying,All her high-born foes came round her, fleering, jeering, as they said:   “What is freedom fought and won for?   She is dead!  She’s down and done for!”And her weeping children shuddered as they crouched and whispered: “Dead!”   Then suddenly up-starting,   All that throng before him parting,See, a man with firm step breaking through that central knot that gives;   And, as by some dear lost sister,   He knelt down, and softly kissed her,And he raised his pale, proud face, and cried: “She is not dead.  She lives!   “O she lives, I say, and I here,   I am come to fight and die hereFor the love my heart has for her like a slow consuming fire;   For the love of her low lying,   For the hatred deep, undyingOf the robber lords who struck and stabbed and trod her in the mire!”   Then upon that cry bewildering,   Some of them, her hapless children —In their hearts there leaped up hope like light when night gives birth to day;   And, as mocks and threats defied him,   One by one they came beside him,Till they stood, a band of heroes, sombre, desperate, at bay!   And the battle that they fought there,   And the bitter truth they taught thereTo the blinded Sister-Nation suffering grievously alway,   All the wrong and rapine past hers,   Of her lords and her task masters,Is not this the larger hope of all as night gives birth to day!   For the lords and liars are quaking   At the People’s stern awakingFrom their slumber of the ages; and the Peoples slowly rise,   And with hands locked tight together,   One in heart and soul for ever,Watch the sun of Light and Liberty leap up into the skies!   That’s the story, that’s the story   With a nobler praise than “glory,”Of the Man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like hell,   And with calm, proud exultation   Bade her stand at last a nation,Ireland, Ireland that is one name with the name of Charles Parnell!AT THE INDIA DOCKSA Memory of August, 1883

[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 of whom are married and have families. By the elaborate system of sub-contracts their wages have been driven down to 4d., 3d., and even 2d. for the few hours they are employed, making the average weekly earnings of a man amount to 7, 6, and even 5 shillings a week! Hundreds and hundreds of lives are lost or ruined every year by the perilous nature of the work, and absolutely without compensation. Yet so fierce is the competition that men are not unfrequently maimed or even killed in the desperate struggles at the gates for the tickets of employment, guaranteeing a “pay” which often does not amount to more than a few pence! The streets and houses inhabited by this unfortunate class are of the lowest kind – haunts of vice, disease, and death, and the monopolistic companies are thus directly able to profit by their wholesale demoralization by ruthlessly crushing out, through the contractors, all efforts at organisation on the part of the men. To see these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine, British Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers, and sailors the first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes by what means the colossal work of loading and unloading them is carried out; this is to face a sacrificial orgy of human life – childhood, youth, manhood, womanhood, and age, with everything that makes them beautiful and ennobling, and not merely a misery and a curse – far more appalling than any Juggernaut progress or the human holocausts that were offered up to Moloch.]

I stood in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flowOf the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe;And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with desperate grief,And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no relief.For never a moment – no; not one – through all the dreary day,And thro’ all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stayOf the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me mad.And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless, stood,And the river’s exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent drainThat carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain —There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city’s light,A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shapeOf that thundering great Machinery from which there was no escape.It stood there high in the heavens, fronting the face of God,And the spray it sprinkled had blasted the green and flowery sodAll round where, through stony precincts, its Cyclopean pillars fellTo its adamantine foundations that were fixed in the womb of hell.And the birds that, wild and whirling, and moth-like, flew to its glareWere struck by the flying wheel-spokes, and maimed and murdered there;And the dust that swept about its black panoply overhead,And the din of it seemed to shatter and scatter the sheeted dead.But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den,And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men,Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see,From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came perpetually —Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing, some crying,Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead and the dyingUp to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breathThat winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain,And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain —How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood,And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood.And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit,And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth of itIn the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel’s devouring breathThat winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.And once again as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on,I saw the shape of the Idol like a king turned carrion,Yet crowned and more terrific thus for his human fleshly loss,And with one clenched hand he brandished a lash, and the other held up a cross!And all around the Altar were seated, joyous and free,In garments richly-coloured and choice, a goodly company,Eating and drinking and wantoning, like gods that scorned to knowOf the thundering great Machinery and the crowds and the Pit below.Ah, Christ! the sights and the sounds there that every hour befellWould wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell,But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease —Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease;Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in the mire;Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been,Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine!And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight,At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of might,When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise,Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies.But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say,For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day.But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel,The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence fell.Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an eye —A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry:“Enough, enough!  It has had enough!  We will march no more till we dropIn the furnace Pit.  Give us food!  Give us rest!  Though the accursed Machinery stop!”And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their feet,And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet.And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod.And “Stop the Machinery!” he yelled, “you might as well stop God!”But the terrible thunder-cry replied: “If this indeed must be,It is you should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine – not we!”And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight,And all the ærial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of might,And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overheadThe great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge, blood-red!But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see or know,Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flowOf the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe!DIRGE(Brisbane.)“A little Soldier of the Army of the Night.”Bury him without a word!   No appeal to death;Only the call of the bird   And the blind spring’s breath.Nature slays ten, yet the one   Reaches but to a partOf what’s to be done, to be sung.   Keep we a proud heart!Let us not glose her waste   With lies and dreams;Fawn on her wanton haste,   Say it but seems.Comrades, with faces unstirred,   Scorning grief’s dole,Though with him, with him lies interred   Our heart and soul,Bury him without a word!   No appeal to death;Only the call of the bird   And the blind spring’s breath.TO QUEEN VICTORIA IN ENGLANDan address on her jubilee yearMadam, you have done well!  Let others with praise unholy,   Speech addressed to a woman who never breathed upon earth,Daub you over with lies or deafen your ears with folly,   I will praise you alone for your actual imminent worth.Madam, you have done well!  Fifty years unforgotten   Pass since we saw you first, a maiden simple and pure.Now when every robber landlord, capitalist rotten,   Hated oppressors, praise you – Madam, we are quite sure!Never once as a foe, open foe, to the popular power,   As nobler kings and queens, have you faced us, fearless and bold:No, but in backstairs fashion, in the stealthy twilight hour,   You have struggled and struck and stabbed, you have bartered and bought and sold!Melbourne, the listless liar, the gentleman blood-beslavered,   Disraeli, the faithless priest of a cynical faith out-worn,These were dear to your heart, these were the men you favoured.   Those whom the People loved were fooled and flouted and torn!Never in one true cause, for your people’s sake and the light’s sake,   Did you strike one honest blow, did you speak one noble word:No, but you took your place, for the sake of wrong and the night’s sake,   Ever with blear-eyed wealth, with the greasy respectable herd.Not as some robber king, with a resolute minister slave to you, 28   Did you swagger with force against us to satisfy your greed:No, but you hoarded and hid what your loyal people gave to you,   Golden sweat of their toil, to keep you a queen indeed!Pure at least was your bed? pure was your Court? – We know not.   Were the white sepulchres pure?  Gather men thorns of grapes?Your sons and your blameless spouse’s, certes, as Galahads show not.   Round you gather a crowd of bloated hypocrite shapes!Never, sure, did one woman produce in such sixes and dozens   Such intellectual canaille as this that springs from you;Sons, daughters, grandchildren, with uncles, aunts, and cousins,   Not a man or a woman among them – a wretched crew!Madam, you have done well!  You have fed all these to repletion —   You have put a gilded calf beside a gilded cow,And bidden men and women behold the forms of human completion —   Albert the Good, Victoria the Virtuous, for ever – and now!But what to you were our bravest and best, man of science and poet,   Struggling for Light and Truth, or the Women who would be free?Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Arnold?  We know it —   Tennyson slavers your hand; Argyll fawns at your knee!Good, you were good, we say.  You had no wit to be evil.   Your purity shines serene over Floras mangled and dead.You wasted not our substance in splendour, in riot or revel —   You quietly sat in the shade and grew fat on our wealth instead.Madam, you have done well!  To you, we say, has been given   A wit past the wit of women, a supercomputable worth.Of you we can say, if not “of such are the Kingdom of Heaven,”   Of such (alas for us!), of such are the Kingdom of Earth!FAREWELL TO THE CHILDRENIn 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 girlsEach with hers swinging in her hand;   I love their sunny curls.I love to see them playing,   Romping and shouting with glee,The boys and girls together,   Simple, fearless, free.I love to see them marching   In squads, in file, in line,Advancing and retreating,   Tramping, keeping time.Sometimes a little lad   With a bright brave face I’ll see,And a wistful yearning wonder   Comes stealing over me.For once I too had a darling;   I dreamed what he should do,And surely he’d have had, I thought,   Just such a face as you.And I, I dreamed to see him   Noble and brave and strong,Loving the light, the lovely,   Hating the dark, the wrong, —Loving the poor, the People,   Ready to smile and giveBlood and brain to their service,   For them to die or live!No matter, O little darlings!   Little boys, you shall beMy citizens for faithful labour,   My soldiers for victory!Little girls, I charge you   Be noble sweethearts, wives,Mothers – comrades the sweetest,   Fountains of happy lives!Farewell, O little darlings!   Far away, – with strangers, too —He sleeps, the little darling,   I dreamed to see like you.And I, O little darlings,   I have many miles to go,And where I too may stop and sleep,   And when, I do not know.But I charge you to remember   The love, the trust I had,That you’d be noble, fearless, free,   And make your country glad!That you should toil together,   Face whatever yet shall be,My citizens for faithful labour,   My soldiers for victory!I charge you to remember;   I bless you with my hand,And I know the hour is coming   When you shall understand:When you shall understand too,   Why, as I said farewell,Although my lips were smiling,   The shining tears down fell.EPODE“On the Ranges, Queensland.”Beyond the night, down o’er the labouring East,I see light’s harbinger of dawn released:Upon the false gleam of the ante-dawn,Lo, the fair heaven of day-pursuing morn!Beyond the lampless sleep and perishing deathThat hold my heart, I feel my new life’s breath,I see the face my spirit-shape shall haveWhen this frail clay and dust have fled the grave.Beyond the night, the death of doubt, defeat,Rise dawn and morn, and life with light doth meet,For the great Cause, too, —sure as the sun yon rayShoots up to strike the threatening clouds and say;“I come, and with me comes the victorious Day!”When I was young, the muse I worshipped took me,   Fearless, a lonely heart, to look on men.   “’Tis yours,” said she, “to paint this show of themEven as they are!”  Then smiling she forsook me.Wherefore with passionate patience I withdrew,   With eyes from which all loves, hates, hopes, and fears,   Joys aureole, and the blinding sheen of tears,Were purged away.  And what I saw I drew.Then, as I worked remote, serene, alone,   A child-girl came to me and touched my cheek,   And lo her lips were pale, her limbs were weak,Her eyes had thirst’s desire and hunger’s moan.She said: “I am the soul of this sad day   Where thousands toil and suffer hideous Crime,   Where units rob and mock the empty timeWith revel and rank prayer and deaths display!”I said: “O child, how shall I leave my songs,   My songs and tales, the warp and subtle woof   Of this great work and web, in your behoofTo strive and passionately sing of wrongs?“Child, is it nothing that I here fulfil   My heart and soul? that I may look and see   Where Homer bends and Shakspere smiles on me,And Goethe praises the unswerving will?”She hung her head, and straight, without a word,   Passed from me.  And I raised my conscious face   To where, in beauteous power in her place,She stood, the muse, my muse, and watched and heard.Her proud and marble brow was faintly flushed;   Upon her flawless lips, and in her eyes   A mild light flickered as the young sunrise,Glad, sacred, terrible, serene and hushed.Then I cried out, and rose with pure wrath wild,   Desperate with hatred of Fate’s slavery   And this cold cruel demon.  With that cry,I left her, and sought out the piteous child.“Darling, ’tis nothing that I shed and weep   These tears of fire that wither all the heart,   These bloody sweats that drain and sear and smart,I love you, and you’ll kiss me when I sleep!”The End

1

In The New Arcadia Miss Robinson devoted to the Cause of Labour a dilettante little book that had not even one note of the true, the sweet and lovely poetry of her deeper impulses. There is the amateur, and the female amateur, no less in perception and emotion than in the technical aspects of our art, and we want no more flimsy “sympathetic” rigmaroles, like “The Cry of the Children,” or “A Song for the Ragged Schools of London,” from those who, in the portraiture of the divine simple woman’s soul within them, can give us poetry complete, genuine, everlasting.

2

His attack on George Eliot in “Fiction, Fair and Foul,” in the Nineteenth Century, for instance.

3

The attack on Missionary Ridge is an example of the brilliant initiative, as the holding of the Bloody Angle in the Wilderness is of the dauntless resolution, of the army of the Democracy of the United States, while the last attacks on Richmond were the final exploit of the conqueror of two combatants, of whom it is enough to say that they were worthy of one another.

4

Something like an adequate account of this great révolution manquée, which in England and 1381 went near to anticipating France and 1793, has at last found its place in the historian’s pages, and Longland the poet, Ball the preacher, and Tyler the man of action, who first raised for us the democratic demand, can be seen somewhat as they were. This, and more, we owe to John Richard Green. An account of the Revolt will be found in section 4 of chapter 5 of his “Short History of the English People.” The phrases in verses 3 and 5 were catchwords among the revolters.

5

After dismissing the peasants with the formally written acknowledgment of their freedom and rights, Richard II. with an army of 40,000 followers avenged himself and his lords by ruthless and prolonged massacres over the whole country.

6

Who owns, and rack-rents, some of the vilest slums in London, and is beautifully æsthetic in private life.

7

The French.

8

“Vœ victis!” woe to the conquered – the motto of the Gauls in Rome as of the modern Civilization of Land and Capital.

9

France.

10

In Père-la-Chaise, the famous Parisian cemetery, the Communists made a desperate stand, but were overcome and the captured ones shot. And Morny’s vaulted tomb was close at hand, and Balzac smiled his animal cynicism from his bust. Victims, murderer, and commenting Chorus, all were there.

11

A part of Paris.