| George Herbert Clarke, ed. (1873–1953). A Treasury of War Poetry. 1917. |
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| 50. Christmas: 1915 |
| | | By Percy MacKaye |
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| NOW is the midnight of the nations: dark | |
| Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas, | |
| Earth, like a mother in birth agonies, | |
| Screams in her travail, and the planets hark | |
| Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark, | 5 |
| Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees | |
| Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades | |
| Wrenching the night’s imponderable arc. | |
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| Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn | |
| Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another | 10 |
| Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother | |
| Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn | |
| From her racked flesh?—What splendour from the smother? | |
| What new-wing’d world, or mangled god still-born? | |
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