C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Amy Lowell (1874–1925)
Poems of the Great War: Before the Declaration of War
O
Guns roaring over the earth,
Belching black smoke into the thin blue sky,
Shattering all silences.
Guns,
Intolerable pounding and beating of guns,
Unbearable crashing crepitation of guns,
Cracking, tearing, rending clash and clamor of ceaseless guns.
And the round still glow of the lamp.
Black dragonflies with sharp yellow flashings,
Swift-darting,
Soaring,
Veering,
Tilting in a wind-slant,
Up, over, and turn in a loop,
With the machine-gun spattering on the one below.
Ha! Ha! I’ve potted him,
Poor devil, gone to kingdom come from six thousand feet,
Bang through a cloud to perdition.
And then go out, one by one, without sound.
With men swarming in their mud
Like cold larvæ crawling through a dying cheese.
Men with frozen feet,
Blank with sleeplessness,
Peering through periscopes
At a waste country stark with burnt trees.
Men popping rifles at a gaunt horizon,
Wounded men lying in squirming earthworm tracks
Waiting for the stretcher bearers.
With the quiet lamp-light making the letters glaze.
And yet I love them.
“Shame!” in red letters across the map of America,
“Peace at any price,”
And the red stripes of the flag
Wind themselves to spell “Shame!”
Bound to Sicily from Penobscot Bay,
With the foam bubbling at her cutwater,
Her big sails out over the starboard gunwale
All drawing,
Bleached white in the sun,
And blue at the turn below the gaff.
They slapped down on the water like Monday washing,
Held her for a moment with their spread,
Then soaked up the waves,
And, still ballooning,
Collapsed and sank,
The Lyman W. Law—
And her set sails swing in the undulating water,
And the name on her stern is fantastic
With the waving of the sea.
I desire peace,
And the peaceful arts
Of quiet centuries.
I love to strew words over a thought
And brighten it to a picture
Lacquered with gold.
But words have poisoned us,
America is sick with words:
“Watchful waiting,”
“Too proud to fight,”
Wolf’s-bane and poppy,
And after them—dreams;
The nightmare visions of opiates,
The horror of stars drowned in smoke,
Of irons branding our monuments.
“Shame!” in crimson letters up Bunker Hill,
“Shame!” flaunted from the cresset of the Statue of Liberty,
“Shame!” ticked out on the headstones of Arlington.
“Shame!” graven on my own heart,
For I only desire peace,
And in my ears I hear the surging of my blood
Striving to obliterate the shame.