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I AWAKE, ye nations, slumbering supine, | |
| Who round enring the European fray! | |
| Heard ye the trumpet sound? “The Day! the Day! | |
| The last that shall on England’s Empire shine! | |
| The Parliament that broke the Right Divine | 5 |
| Shall see her realm of reason swept away, | |
| And lesser nations shall the sword obey— | |
| The sword o’er all carve the great world’s design!” | |
| |
| So on the English Channel boasts the foe | |
| On whose imperial brow death’s helmet nods. | 10 |
| Look where his hosts o’er bloody Belgium go, | |
| And mix a nation’s past with blazing sods! | |
| A kingdom’s waste! a people’s homeless woe! | |
| Man’s broken Word, and violated gods! | |
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II Far fall the day when England’s realm shall see | 15 |
| The sunset of dominion! Her increase | |
| Abolishes the man-dividing seas, | |
| And frames the brotherhood on earth to be! | |
| She, in free peoples planting sovereignty, | |
| Orbs half the civil world in British peace; | 20 |
| And though time dispossess her, and she cease, | |
| Rome-like she greatens in man’s memory. | |
| |
| Oh, many a crown shall sink in war’s turmoil, | |
| And many a new republic light the sky, | |
| Fleets sweep the ocean, nations till the soil, | 25 |
| Genius be born and generations die, | |
| Orient and Occident together toil, | |
| Ere such a mighty work man rears on high! | |
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III Hearken, the feet of the Destroyer tread | |
| The wine-press of the nations; fast the blood | 30 |
| Pours from the side of Europe; in the flood | |
| On the septentrional watershed | |
| The rivers of fair France are running red! | |
| England, the mother-aerie of our brood, | |
| That on the summit of dominion stood, | 35 |
| Shakes in the blast: heaven battles overhead! | |
| |
| Lift up thy head, O Rheims, of ages heir | |
| That treasured up in thee their glorious sum; | |
| Upon whose brow, prophetically fair, | |
| Flamed the great morrow of the world to come; | 40 |
| Haunt with thy beauty this volcanic air | |
| Ere yet thou close, O Flower of Christendom! | |
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IV As when the shadow of the sun’s eclipse | |
| Sweeps on the earth, and spreads a spectral air, | |
| As if the universe were dying there, | 45 |
| On continent and isle the darkness dips | |
| Unwonted gloom, and on the Atlantic slips; | |
| So in the night the Belgian cities flare | |
| Horizon-wide; the wandering people fare | |
| Along the roads, and load the fleeing ships. | 50 |
| |
| And westward borne that planetary sweep | |
| Darkening o’er England and her times to be, | |
| Already steps upon the ocean-deep! | |
| Watch well, my country, that unearthly sea, | |
| Lest when thou thinkest not, and in thy sleep, | 55 |
| Unapt for war, that gloom enshadow thee. | |
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V I pray for peace; yet peace is but a prayer. | |
| How many wars have been in my brief years! | |
| All races and all faiths, both hemispheres, | |
| My eyes have seen embattled everywhere | 60 |
| The wide earth through; yet do I not despair | |
| Of peace, that slowly through far ages nears; | |
| Though not to me the golden morn appears, | |
| My faith is perfect in time’s issue fair. | |
| |
| For man doth build on an eternal scale, | 65 |
| And his ideals are framed of hope deferred; | |
| The millennium came not; yet Christ did not fail, | |
| Though ever unaccomplished is His word; | |
| Him Prince of Peace, though unenthroned, we hail, | |
| Supreme when in all bosoms He be heard. | 70 |
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VI This is my faith, and my mind’s heritage, | |
| Wherein I toil, though in a lonely place, | |
| Who yet world-wide survey the human race | |
| Unequal from wild nature disengage | |
| Body and soul, and life’s old strife assuage; | 75 |
| Still must abide, till heaven perfect its grace, | |
| And love grown wisdom sweeten in man’s face, | |
| Alike the Christian and the heathen rage. | |
| |
| The tutelary genius of mankind | |
| Ripens by slow degrees the final State, | 80 |
| That in the soul shall its foundations find | |
| And only in victorious love grow great; | |
| Patient the heart must be, humble the mind, | |
| That doth the greater births of time await! | |
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VII Whence not unmoved I see the nations form | 85 |
| From Dover to the fountains of the Rhine, | |
| A hundred leagues, the scarlet battle-line, | |
| And by the Vistula great armies swarm, | |
| A vaster flood; rather my breast grows warm, | |
| Seeing all peoples of the earth combine | 90 |
| Under one standard, with one countersign, | |
| Grown brothers in the universal storm. | |
| |
| And never through the wide world yet there rang | |
| A mightier summons! O Thou who from the side | |
| Of Athens and the loins of Cæsar sprang, | 95 |
| Strike, Europe, with half the coming world allied | |
| For those ideals for which, since Homer sang, | |
| The hosts of thirty centuries have died. | |
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