The New Locksley Hall

'Forty Years After'

COMRADE, yet a little further I would go before the night
Closes round and chills in darkness all the glorious sunset light —
Yet a little, by the cliff there, till the stately home I see
Of the man who once was with us, comrade once with you and me!
Nay, but leave me, pass alone there; stay awhile and gaze again
On the various-jewelled waters and the dreamy southern main,
For the evening breeze is sighing in the quiet of the hills,
Moving down in cliff and terrace to the singing sweet sea-rills,
While the river, silent-stealing, thro' the copse and thro' the lea
Winds her waveless way eternal to the welcome of the sea.
Yes, within that green-clad homestead, gardened grounds and velvet ease
Of a home where culture reigneth and the chambers whisper peace,
Is the Man, the Seer and Singer, who (ah, years and years away!)
Lifted up a face of gladness at the breaking of the day.
For the noontide's desperate ardours that had seen the Roman town
Wrap the boy Keats, 'by the hungry generations trodden down,'
In his death-shroud with the ashes of the fairy Child of Storm,
Fluttering skylark in the breakers, caught and smothered by the foam,
And had closed those eyes heroic, weary for the final peace,
Byron maimed and maddened, strangled in the anguish that was
Greece —
For this noontide passed to darkness, brooding doubt and wild dismay,
Where the silly sparrows chirruped and the eagles swooped away,
Till once more the trampled Peoples and the murdered soul of Man
Raised a haggard face half-wondering where the new-born Day began,
Where the sign of Faith's renewal, Faith's and Hope's, and Love's,
outgrew
In the golden sun arising; and we hailed it, we and you!
O you hailed it, and your heart beat, and your pretty woman's lays,
In the fathomless vibration of our rapturous amaze,
Died for ever on your harpstrings, and you rose and struck a chord
High, full, clear, heroic, godlike, 'for the glory of the Lord!'
Noble words you spoke; we listened; and we dreamed the day had come
When the faith of God and Christ should sound one cry with Man's
freedom —
When the men who stood beside us, eager with hell's troops to cope,
Radiant, thrilled exultant, proud, with the magnificence of hope!
'Forward! forward!' ran our watchword. 'Forward! forward!' by our
side
You gave back the glorious summons. Would that day that you had died!
Better lying fallen, death-struck, breathless, bleeding, on your face,
With your bright sword pointing onward, dying happy in your place!
Better to have passed in spirit from the battle-storm's eclipse
With the great Cause in your heart and with the war-shout on your lips!
Better to have fallen charging, having known the nobler time,
In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line —
Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead,
Up the slopes and thro' the smoke-clouds, thro' the dying and the dead,
Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout,
On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!
O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain
That remembered Egypt's flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed
again —
Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills,
And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills.
There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves,
(Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of slaves,
Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stew
Where freedom 'broadens down' so slow it stops with lords and you!
O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes,
Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times,
Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet knights
Tilted gaily, or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights?
O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best,
Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not
rest —
Men of science, 'vivisectors!' democrats, the 'rout of beasts' —
Writers, essayists and poets, 'Belial's prophets, Moloch's priests!'
Coward, you have made the great refusal! you have won the gilded
praise
Of the wringers of his heart's-blood from the peasant's sunless days,
Of the Lord and the Land-owner, of the Rich-man who has bound
Labour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the ground,
With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had,
Crying 'Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them mad!'
Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to take
What of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood's sake