I sing the people; shall the Muse deny
The weak, the blind, the humble and the lame
Who have no purpose save to multiply,
Who have no will save all to be the same:
I sing the people as I watch, untamed,
Its aimless pomps and generations roll—
A monster whom the drunken gods have maimed
And set upon a road that has no goal.
How fiercely callous Nature plies her whips
When that tame hydra on the light uprears
Huge buttock-faces slashed with flabby lips,
Gouged into eyes, and tortured into ears.
A shapeless mass to any rhythm worked,
See how its legs to raucous music stir
As if some string of sausages were jerked,
And tugged, and worried by a snarling cur!
Do they too have their loves, and with these clods
Of bodies do they dare on their bodes
To parody our dalliance, or the gods’,
By coupling in the chilly sport of toads?
Do they too feel and hate—under our wheels
Could they be crushed the deeper in the slime
When forth we ride elate with bloody heels,
Or jingle in the silver spurs of rhyme?
Funnelled with roaring mouths that gorp like cod
And spit the bitten ends of thick cigars,
This is the beast that dares to praise its god
Under the calm derision of the stars!
When from the lonely beacons that we tend
We gaze far down across the nameless flats,
Where the dark road of progress without end
Is cobbled with a line of bowler hats,
Searching the lampless horror of that fen,
We think of those whose pens or swords have made
Steep ladders of the broken bones of men
To climb above its everlasting shade:
Of men whose scorn has turned them into gods,
Christs, tyrants, martyrs, who in blood or fire
Drove their clean furrows through these broken clods
Yet raised no harvest from such barren mire.
In the cold hour when poets light their tapers
And the tall Muse glides naked to the door,
When by its love, its drinks, its evening papers,
All Babel has been lulled into a snore,
The pious poet in that silence hears
Like some pure hymn uplifting his desires
How Nero’s fiddle shrills across the years
And to its music leap the dancing fires—
And the great Master of the radiant spheres
Turns from the sleeping multitudes in scorn
To where he sees our lonely flames and hears,
As when before him sang the sons of morn,
Down the far ages ringing lofty chimes,
Above the prayers of that huge carrion soul,
Our sacrifices, miracles, and crimes,
Up to the Throne their sounding anthems roll.